A just future requires a third path: robust international frameworks that guarantee informed consent, fair compensation, psychological support, and legal parentage rights for the child—without economic coercion. Until then, the silent cradles of Dum Dum will continue to whisper a difficult truth: that the womb is not a factory, and the child born from such labor deserves a world that values the dignity of both the carrier and the carried. The ghosts of Baby Manji and the thousands of anonymous surrogates still haunt those bylanes, reminding us that in the marketplace of motherhood, the most vulnerable always pay the highest price.
The compensation, typically between $3,000 and $5,000, was a life-changing sum in a region where the per capita annual income was less than $1,000. It could buy a small plot of land, pay off a moneylender, or fund a son’s education. However, the lived experience was one of benevolent confinement. To ensure healthy pregnancies, women were sequestered for months. They ate regulated meals, underwent constant medical checks, and were forbidden from sexual activity or strenuous work. Their own children were often left behind with grandmothers. While clinic managers framed this as care, critics called it a carceral form of reproductive labor. The surrogate’s body was no longer her own; it was a leased vessel, monitored and managed for a global clientele. The central ethical debate surrounding surrogacy in Dum Dum hinges on the question of agency. Proponents, including Dr. Chakravarty, famously argued that their surrogates were empowered "heroines" making a rational economic choice. They pointed to high satisfaction surveys and the fact that many women returned for second or third surrogacy cycles. Indeed, for some, the income provided genuine upward mobility. surrogacy in dum dum
Baby Manji was the canary in the coal mine. Subsequent stories emerged of abandoned twins, of German parents denied exit visas, and of surrogates left unpaid when foreign clients defaulted. The Indian government, initially keen on "medical tourism," grew alarmed. In 2015, it banned commercial surrogacy for foreign nationals. Then, in 2018, the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act was finally passed, a draconian piece of legislation that effectively killed the industry in Dum Dum. The Act banned commercial surrogacy outright, allowing only altruistic surrogacy for married, infertile Indian couples. It prohibited single parents, LGBTQ+ couples, and foreign nationals. It also mandated that the surrogate must be a "close relative" of the intended parents. Today, the surrogacy hostels of Dum Dum stand silent or have been converted into cheap paying guest accommodations. The IRM continues to operate, but its international surrogacy wing is shuttered. The law, ostensibly designed to protect women from exploitation, had a perverse effect. It did not eliminate the demand for surrogacy, nor did it address the poverty that drove women to offer their wombs. Instead, it drove the industry underground or across borders to unregulated clinics in Georgia, Kenya, or Mexico. The women of Dum Dum who once saw surrogacy as their only escape route have returned to the informal economy—pounding bricks at construction sites, rolling beedis, or begging. A just future requires a third path: robust
In the popular imagination, the global fertility industry is often associated with gleaming clinics in California, the high-tech hubs of Israel, or the sunny, unregulated markets of Ukraine. Yet, for nearly two decades, one of its most significant, complex, and ethically fraught nerve centers existed not in a Western metropolis, but in the modest, congested bylanes of Dum Dum, West Bengal. Once a quiet colonial cantonment town known for its ammunition factory, Dum Dum transformed in the early 21st century into an unlikely global capital of commercial surrogacy. This essay explores the rise, the lived reality, and the eventual decline of surrogacy in Dum Dum, using its unique trajectory as a lens to examine the profound tensions between medical technology, economic desperation, women’s autonomy, and the heavy hand of the law. The Genesis of a Reproductive Hub The story of surrogacy in Dum Dum cannot be separated from the story of Dr. Narendranath Chakravarty and his clinic, the Institute of Reproductive Medicine and Women’s Health (IRM). In the early 2000s, while commercial surrogacy existed in legal limbo across India—neither fully legal nor illegal—Dr. Chakravarty saw an opportunity. India offered a perfect storm of conditions: world-class medical infrastructure at a fraction of Western prices, a vast English-speaking population, and a legal system that did not explicitly prohibit altruistic or commercial surrogacy. The compensation, typically between $3,000 and $5,000, was
The legacy of Dum Dum is profoundly ambiguous. On one hand, the city served as a living laboratory for a radical form of reproductive commerce, demonstrating that the human uterus could be commodified, priced, and rented globally. On the other hand, the surrogates of Dum Dum were among the first women in the world to transform gestation into a form of wage labor, challenging traditional notions of motherhood and kinship. Their stories resist easy moral categories: they were neither pure victims nor free agents, but complex actors navigating an impossible choice within a system that was, from the start, structurally unequal. The surrogacy saga of Dum Dum is more than a local history of a Kolkata suburb; it is a cautionary parable for the age of globalized reproduction. As technology advances—with artificial wombs on the horizon and transnational fertility markets booming—Dum Dum stands as a monument to what happens when innovation outpaces ethics and regulation. The answer to the exploitation witnessed there is not simply prohibition, which drives the poor back into silent desperation. Nor is it unrestrained free market, which reduces women to incubators.
Yet, a deeper investigation reveals a more troubling picture. Studies conducted by Kolkata-based sociologists found that informed consent was often nominal. Many women had limited literacy, did not fully understand the medical risks of IVF (including ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome or the trauma of a Caesarean section), and were heavily influenced by husbands or mothers-in-law who viewed their wombs as family assets. The contracts, written in English, were rarely translated comprehensively into Bengali or Hindi. Furthermore, the psychological toll was immense. Women spoke of profound grief after being forced to hand over the newborn immediately after birth—an act of separation that many likened to a living death. The "happy surrogate" holding a thank-you card from a foreign couple was a carefully curated photograph, obscuring the months of isolation, physical pain, and unresolved emotional trauma. The surrogacy industry in Dum Dum thrived in the shadows of legal ambiguity until the late 2010s, when a series of international scandals forced the Indian government to act. The most infamous involved a Japanese couple, Ikufumi and Yuki Yamada, who commissioned a child through an IRM surrogate. Before the baby was born, the couple divorced. Neither parent wanted the child. The baby, nicknamed "Baby Manji" after a character in a manga, was born in Dum Dum and became a stateless orphan, trapped for over a year in a legal battle over nationality, custody, and citizenship. The case traveled to the Indian Supreme Court and made headlines worldwide, exposing the terrifying legal vacuum: there was no law determining who was the legal parent of a child born to an Indian surrogate for foreign nationals.
Dum Dum, with its proximity to Kolkata’s international airport and its relatively low cost of living, became the epicenter. For approximately $10,000 to $15,000—compared to over $100,000 in the United States—intended parents from America, Australia, Japan, and Europe could secure a gestational surrogate. The draw was not merely financial. Dum Dum offered a turnkey service: in-house egg donors, legal counsel to navigate the tricky waters of parentage, and comfortable guesthouses where foreign couples could wait out the pregnancy. For a brief, shining decade, Dum Dum was to surrogacy what Shenzhen is to electronics: the world’s factory. To understand surrogacy in Dum Dum, one must look beyond the sterile, optimistic brochures and into the residential hostels that proliferated around the IRM. These were not hospitals but converted residential buildings, often cramped and rudimentary, where dozens of surrogates lived together under 24-hour supervision. For most women, the decision to become a surrogate was not one of liberation but of stark necessity. They came from the impoverished districts of Bengal, Bihar, and Jharkhand—rural women, often married and already mothers themselves, carrying debts from a husband’s illness, a failed harvest, or a daughter’s dowry.