The Pune Crime Branch has once again placed under arrest the already-disgraced former Sassoon General Hospital superintendent, Dr Ajay Taware, this time for his alleged involvement in a kidney transplant racket at Ruby Hall Clinic, one of the city’s premier private hospitals. Taware, already under judicial custody in Yerwada Central Jail for tampering with evidence in the Pune Porsche crash case, now finds himself entangled in a major organ trafficking investigation that threatens to blow the lid off deep-rooted medical corruption in Maharashtra.
Dr Taware, once considered a respected figure in public healthcare, is now being portrayed by law enforcement as a repeat offender who has serially misused his institutional authority for criminal gain. His second arrest in under a year raises serious questions about oversight, accountability, and the ease with which medical institutions in India can be manipulated by insiders.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) Nikhil Pingale confirmed the arrest to media, stating: “We have taken Dr Ajay Taware into custody in the kidney racket case and he will be produced before the court today.”
Taware’s role is being probed in a 2022 illegal kidney transplant operation that took place under his watch as the head of the Regional Authorisation Committee, the official body mandated to vet and approve all live organ transplants in the region.
At the centre of this racket was a fraudulent swap transplant carried out at Ruby Hall Clinic. According to the police, a woman from Kolhapur was paid to impersonate the wife of a patient in need of a kidney. In the staged transplant, she donated her kidney to a young woman, whose mother then donated her kidney to the Kolhapur man in a mutually “beneficial” exchange.
Such paired kidney exchanges are legal only among close relatives, subject to thorough verification by the Regional Authorisation Committee.
However, the racket came to light when the Kolhapur woman publicly revealed her real identity four days after the surgery, alleging she was not paid the promised Rs 15 lakh. This stunning confession, made during a financial dispute, opened a Pandora’s box of forged documents, fake familial ties, and deliberate bypassing of legal safeguards by medical authorities.
A total of 15 individuals were booked by the police, including medical staff and the managing trustee of Ruby Hall Clinic. Dr Taware’s arrest is considered crucial, as investigators believe he used his powerful post to greenlight the illegal transplant, despite evident red flags in identity verification.
This latest arrest piles further disgrace on Taware, whose previous brush with infamy came during the 2024 Pune Porsche crash scandal. Taware was arrested for allegedly falsifying blood test results to protect a 17-year-old from an influential family who rammed a high-speed Porsche into two motorcyclists, killing them instantly in Kalyani Nagar.
Despite eyewitness accounts and initial reports suggesting that the teen was under the influence of alcohol, forensic results submitted by Sassoon Hospital – under Taware’s watch – showed otherwise. Later investigations revealed that blood samples were swapped, and attempts were made to destroy evidence, clearly indicating a cover-up orchestrated within the hospital.
While the Human Organ Transplant Act (HOTA) was designed to regulate transplants and prevent exploitation, poor implementation and corrupt oversight bodies have left gaping loopholes.
“The swap transplant racket at Ruby Hall is not an isolated case—it is just the tip of the iceberg,” said a senior health official on condition of anonymity. “The entire system of verifying kinship and consent is being bypassed through forged documents, all with the tacit approval of those in power.”
