Inside the NCR womb factory: How poverty forces workers’ wives to become surrogate mothers in Noida, Loni, and Gurgaon

A bunch of 22 pregnant women are anxiously waiting to deliver, though without any other emotion attached to the new arrivals.

Staying away from their families in a residential building on Sohna Road, Gurgaon, hard cash is their only need – and hope.

Hailing from various industrial zones in and around the Capital, these women are the new wombs-for-hire pool in India.

A major reason why these areas have become a fertile ground for the surrogacy industry is the poor social and financial status of the labour force.

Surrogate mothers get paid between Rs 2.75 lakh and Rs 3 lakh at Vansh Surrogacy Consultants, which claims to be the first surrogacy home in Gurgaon.

Surrogates often receive more money than promised. If a mother conceives twins, the compensation amount increases.

Surrogacy consultants find easy availability of rent-a-womb women in the NCR’s industrial hubs to service their clients.

Udyog Vihar in Gurgaon, Loni in Ghaziabad, Wazirabad and Kapashera industrial areas and parts of Rohini are among such addresses.

“We have recently identified these industrial areas for surrogacy purposes. Ten field executives propagate information regarding financial benefits of surrogacy and counseling in these areas. We currently have 22 surrogates in our surrogate home,” said Bajrang Sharan of Gurgaon-based Vansh Surrogacy Consultants.

“We focus on blue collar workers as they need the money. They are young, married and prove to be good surrogate mothers. Of course, we tell them everything about the procedure and the risks involved. Only 50 per cent of the women who volunteer for surrogacy are selected, based on their health status,” he added.

While such consultants provide only surrogates, the pregnancy-related treatment and delivery is done in hospitals of repute.

“We provide food, accommodation and general medical check-ups while the women’s medical needs are taken care of at hospitals like Max, Fortis, Sir Ganga Ram, Neelkanth, Artemis and Mata Chanan Devi,” Sharan said.

Several reasons

The surrogates have an array of reasons to rent out their wombs, including making money for the future or getting treatment for an ailing family member.

Geeta, a surrogate mother who has recently delivered twins for an IAS officer who was childless for 14 years, needed the money after her husband was diagnosed with cancer. It required long-term treatment in a hospital, which would cost more than Rs 2 lakh.

Geeta paid the hospital expenses with the amount she earned from renting out her womb.

“My husband works in a factory in Delhi. It was anyway difficult for us to run the house with his meagre salary, and then he was diagnosed with cancer. We hardly had any money, so I opted for surrogacy. We managed the interim with our small savings. After my delivery, my husband underwent the surgery,” she added.

For her daughter

Manju, another surrogate mother, was worried about her 10- year-old daughter’s future. The money she earned through surrogacy, Manju has put it in a fixed deposit in the daughter’s name so that she could be easily married off when she becomes a major.

According to experts, late marriages, stress and erratic lifestyles have led to a significant rise in infertility among couples.

This knowledge has also led to awareness and acceptance of fertility treatments such as in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). To cash in on this trend, infertility centres and clinics are looping in surrogacy consultants to find suitable women who can rent out their wombs for a fee.

The IVF centres have slowly turned into hotspots for medical tourism as a number of foreigners come to India in search of surrogates for their easy availability and affordability.

The fertility industry in India has now become an integral part of the country’s growing medical tourism industry.

Grey area

Commercial surrogacy has been allowed in India since 2002, but it still remains an unregulated grey area.

A United Nations-backed study conducted two years ago estimates the surrogacy business in India to be worth more than $400 million a year, but civil society activists say the size of the market could well be more than twice the amount.

The problems with commercial surrogacy in India are both ethical and legal. The absence of regulation raises the spectre of a surrogacy black market, selling of babies and even questions of legal rights of a surrogate mother and the baby.

For instance, before a pregnancy is commissioned, a contract is signed between the parties involved. However, according to a study published in 2014 by the Centre for Social Research (CSR), an NGO dealing with women’s issues, 88 per cent of surrogate mothers in Delhi and 76 per cent in Mumbai did not know the terms of their contract.

No contract

In fact, 92 per cent of the surrogates in Delhi did not even have a copy of the contract and only 27 per cent of the clinics in Delhi and 11.4 per cent in Mumbai were party to the contract.

The contract is usually signed between the surrogate mother and her husband and the commissioning parents.

‘I did it for my son’

Soni, 21

Twenty-one-year-old Soni received Rs 2.75 lakh for a baby she delivered last month. The infant was handed over to an infertile couple.

The wife of a factory worker in West Delhi, Soni desperately needed the money to save the life of her son, who suffered from a brain ailment that could only be cured through a major surgery.

“We were worried because we had a limited source of income and the surgery was expensive,” said Soni. This, she said, compelled her to become a surrogate mother.

Her son underwent a surgery within days of Soni delivering the baby.

“Once we got the money, we admitted him in the hospital. At one end, I was discharged from hospital after delivering the baby and at the other, my son was admitted in the hospital for surgery. I earned Rs 2.75 lakh in nine months for my child’s treatment without resorting to any unfair means or taking a huge debt,” she said.