Kinjal Desai | DNA | 21 May 2012
For many poor women, surrogacy offers a way out of poverty as do clinical trial of drugs, including those for comatose patients.
Living dangerously is nothing new for a majority of the women of Ward 56 of Amraiwadi area, even if the risks that the women take are merely to escape the poverty that bedevils the locality.
More than 70% of the women in Amraiwadi are forced to make ends meet either by donating blood for money or by volunteering to be guinea pigs for pharmaceutical companies.
Among the medicines for which clinical trials are conducted on women volunteers from the area are drugs for treatment of comatose patients. If they recover from the artificially induced coma, they can hope to earn as much as Rs1 lakh. If something goes wrong and a volunteer does not come out of coma, she gets nothing unless her spouse has been informed from before.