New Delhi, Aug. 7 -- During the investigative field work I did for my book Baby Makers: The story of Indian Surrogacy (2014), I came across several scams, including one in my own hometown Bengaluru where a fraud specialist collected lakhs from couples and put them through the painful agony of fertility treatments, before planting embryos unrelated to them in the wombs of surrogates he had hired "on their behalf". He was unmasked when a parent ran a DNA test on his child and found it had no genetic connection to him or his wife.

More than 10 years later a similar scam has emerged in Hyderabad on a larger scale and is even more fraudulent than the old ones. In this case, a doctor who ran a "fertility" hospital was allegedly involved in tra...