The demand of Indian surrogates in the Surrogacy market is on an incline as the Indian surrogacy industry sees a steady rise in number of British nationals preferring Indian women to bear their child.
In a recent estimation there are at present nearly 1,000 unregulated fertility clinics in India, out which quite a few are helping Britons in becoming parents.
Owing to the fact that commercial surrogacy is illegal in the United Kingdom, the business seems to be quite lucrative as couples and single parents pay at an average 25,000 pounds a visit to have a child in India.
It’s a general consensus among experts that for the Indian surrogacy market Britain is the largest single source of people, who opt for becoming parents through surrogacy, and an estimated 2,000 births last year, through surrogacy in the country validates the fact.
The need for regulations for the industry which Indian officials believe to be worth almost 1.5 billion pounds a year, seems necessary, as Indian women are paid upto 6,000 pounds to donate their eggs and carry the babies, which is banned in the United Kingdom, hence the inflow of British visitors has increased manifold over the years.
According to a survey of the market by British Doctors it has been revealed that people from almost all professions be it bankers, senior civil servants, executives at multinational companies and even NHS doctors have become parents through Indian Surrogates.
Dr. Radhey Sharma India’s leading Fertility Expert, who had been commissioned by the Indian Government to study this rise in fertility treatments, in order to help in the preparation of legislation to regulate the rapidly growing industry, said that the actuality of the scale of operations in the country of what is being termed as “baby factories” is unknown, though he does believe that the Indian surrogacy industry “dwarfs any other in the rest of the world”.
“I have a database of some 600 IVF clinics in India, but that is according to me not a complete list. According to my estimation there could be around 400 more clinics operating without any regulation as nobody in India actually knows for sure the number of births that take place in the country because of these commercial enterprises, and the number of places that are involved.”, he revealed.
With measures being taken to regulate the Surrogacy Industry, this rise in the number of Britons becoming parents through Indian surrogates would as some hope, be effectively blocked.