A strong nation-wide mechanism is required so that major organs from brain dead persons could be immediately available to a needy patient, director of a government agency working for organ transplant said today.

The gap between the needy and the donor cannot be bridged unless organs are taken from brain dead patients, National Organ & Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO) Director Dr Vimal Bhandari told reporters here. "The NOTTO aimed at having a stronger system to ensure that organs like hearts and livers from brain dead persons are immediately made available to a needy patient through a networking mechanism," he told reporters.

There should be a network across the nation, so that the heart of a brain dead person can be taken from Kolkata to Delhi in the quickest possible time, said Bhandari who attended a workshop on organ donation of the brain dead here. This system will bridge the huge gap between donor and recipients as only live organ donation is not enough, he said. Bhandari said under NOTTO, five Regional Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisations (ROTTO) centres have come up in the country.

One of them is at the Post Graduate Medical Education and Research in Kolkata that covers five states of the East - Bihar, Odisha, Jharkhand, Sikkim and West Bengal, he said. Besides, 18 private hospitals in the state are registered under NOTTO. Bhandari said 21 states, from all over the country, have adopted NOTTO and among them "Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Maharashtra, Kerala and Karnataka are really doing well. We hope West Bengal will catch up in another 3-4 years." Joint Director ROTTO, Prof Arpita Ray Chaudhury said, in 2017 there was only one case of the organ transplant of a brain dead person in West Bengal while there were five cases in 2016.