A farm loan attracts organ traffickers

“I am actually lucky,” Roshan Sadashiv Kule tells PARI. Lucky that he is alive. Lucky that he is home.

It all began when five years ago, this 34-year-old small farmer from Minthur village found his 12 Jersey cows in the grip of lumpy skin disease. It was March 2021, cattle from across Maharashtra were succumbing, even as the second wave of Covid-19 was sweeping the country.

“I spent a lot of money on their treatment,” Roshan recalls. “But their health did not improve.”

Six cows died. Milk production collapsed. The dairy income stopped. But expenses did not. The small farmer from Chandrapur’s forest-rich Nagbhid tehsil did not have cash to buy medicines and vaccines for his six remaining cows.

Bank loans were hard to come by during the pandemic-induced liquidity crunch. At the insistence of a friend working as a banking correspondent, Roshan approached a private lender in nearby Bramhapuri town for an informal loan of Rs. 1 lakh.

He thought his immediate crisis was over.

“That’s when it began,” he recalls.

A loan of Rs. 1 lakh that Roshan took to buy life-saving medicines for his cows in March 2021 spiralled to Rs. 50 lakh from unregistered lenders, and further sucked the dairy farmer into an illegal organ transplantation racket that cost him his kidney. He was entrapped in an international cybercrime racket that trapped him in Laos.

Roshan is the complainant-victim in a case filed in November 2025 that has taken police officials all over the country, unearthing eerie scam networks.

The FIR, evidence, and chargesheet perused by PARI and interviews with Roshan and his family members reveal how a vicious moneylending racket operating unchecked in the rural hinterland intersected with an entrenched illegal organ trade network involving middlemen, hospitals, and doctors across states and neighbouring countries.

The case covers two tracks: One, the illegal money-lending racket. The second, a bigger illegal organ trafficking racket.

The Chandrapur police have recently filed a preliminary chargesheet before a sessions court with 6,000 pages of documentary evidence – victim statements, bank transactions, travel records, WhatsApp chats, hospital documents, allegedly fake identity papers, and financial diaries maintained by the two groups of accused.

Waiting to register his statement at the Chandrapur district police headquarters in mid-April, the exhausted and teary-eyed father of two recounts to PARI how that one loan taken in a moment of urgent need plunged him and his family into a quagmire that they are struggling to come out of five years on.

“I wish I’d never borrowed that money,” Roshan rues.

In rural Vidarbha, debts can be crushing. But in Roshan’s case, repayment meant mortgaging his body. In 2024, he sold one of his kidneys in Cambodia, where he was taken as part of a group of at least a dozen people, 20-32 years old and in debt, through a covert pan-India network. The following year, he landed in the deadly scamming compounds of Laos, but was fortunate to have been rescued.

Six moneylenders, arrested in December 2025 on charges of extortion, illegal confinement and assault, are out on bail now. Half a dozen accused in the kidney sale racket, including the alleged kingpin, were arrested from across India and are in magisterial custody. Two other accused, including the owner of a big hospital in Tamil Nadu, are absconding.

Until 2021, Roshan’s and much of his family’s livelihood rested on steady income from their dairy business – before the lumpy skin disease spurred the crisis. In addition, they grew paddy and vegetables on their four-acre farm. It was Roshan and his younger brother Amol who had recently diversified into dairy.

Their father, Sadashiv Kule, had retired as a mechanic at a railway locomotive shed in nearby Nagbhid town with a modest pension. He used his savings to buy the land and also for the marriages of his three children – two sons and a daughter.

The Kules owned 12 jersey cows and earned around Rs. 80,000 a month supplying milk to local markets and dairy companies. Roshan and Amol had built a big cattle shed financed by a bank loan under a government programme, and wanted to expand the dairy operations.

Then, the cows fell ill and started dying.

The first lender, Manish Ghatbandhe — named as an accused in the FIR and chargesheet — gave Roshan short-term credit.

Within weeks, Roshan alleges, his terms hardened.

“He told me to return the money within 15 days,” Roshan says. “When I could not, he said I would have to pay 20 per cent interest and a penalty of 5,000 rupees per day.”

When Roshan objected, he was beaten up. That rattled the family. What followed was not a single loan spiralling out of control, but multiple loans overlapping and compounding astronomically. To repay his money, the first lender pushed Roshan to the second; the second transferred him to the third, and so on.

Names recur throughout his statement and the chargesheet — Kishor Bawankule, Laxman Uke (Urkude), Pradeep Bawankule, Satyavan Borkar, Sanjay Ballarpure.

“They forced me to borrow from cooperative societies, microfinance institutions, and banks, and even forged documents to get my loans sanctioned so that I could repay their money,” Roshan tells PARI during one of several interviews over five months.

Money moved through bank withdrawals and loans from relatives and cooperatives. Much of what was borrowed was immediately redirected to repay earlier debts, either through bank or UPI transfers, and sometimes by cash.

In his FIR, Roshan attempts to account for the total amount extracted from him. The numbers are mind-boggling:

“I took Rs. 1 lakh from Manish Ghatbandhe. I repaid him 6 to 6.5 lakh rupees,” he states.

“I took. 50,000 rupees from Kishor Bawankule. I repaid 6.58 lakh through cash and online transfers.”

“I took 4.35 lakh rupees from Laxman Uke; I repaid 16 lakh rupees.

“I took Rs. 2.8 lakh from Pradeep, and against that I paid him Rs. 13 lakh in cash and also gave him one acre of land.

“I had also taken money from Satyavan Borkar and Sanjay Ballarpure, and I repaid them amounts exceeding 3.5 lakh rupees.”

Transactions corroborated by the investigators through the confiscated diaries, bank statements and account details reveal that Roshan paid the lenders nearly Rs. 50 lakh. The cash transactions are not accounted for. Roshan insists he paid Rs. 72-75 lakh but does not have proof of the cash payments.

“We have mentioned in the chargesheet only that amount which we have evidence for,” says Mumakka Sudarshan, the Superintendent of Police (SP), Chandrapur.

Sudarshan was transferred to Ahilyanagar in a routine transfer exercise in May this year. He instituted a Special Investigation Team of the local crime branch sleuths to probe the case, putting the Additional Superintendent of Police Ishwar Katkhede in charge.

The chargesheet also records allegations of intimidation, coercion, wrongful confinement, physical assault, and extortion.

“They once locked me in a garage,” Roshan alleges, “and beat me; my brother was with me.”

Private moneylenders can operate in Maharashtra if they are registered, and follow the law. None of the six moneylenders was registered, the chargesheet says. A separate inquiry by the officials of the revenue and cooperation department confirmed that their operations were entirely illegal.

The Kules live in a large independent house in Minthur built over years of savings. Today, it is mortgaged to four different financial institutions. So is the cattle shed built with a loan from the Vidarbha Konkan Cooperative Bank branch in Nagbhid in 2018. It is now empty.

“We also needed money for our exigencies and daily needs,” Roshan says at his home. So some of the funds raised through loans and mortgages went into meeting the household expenses and for his parents’ health care.

The borrowings spread through the family. Loans were taken in the names of his wife Rohini, brother Amol, sister-in-law Sharada, father Sadashiv and mother Nirmala. Roshan had to also borrow from his friends and acquaintances in the village and his married sister Rameshwari Radke, who lives in a distant village in the same district.

“We kept borrowing in different accounts,” Roshan says.

When the interest spiralled, he pawned in installments nearly 14 tolas of the family gold.

The lenders confiscated his Swaraj tractor. Two motorcycles were sold. Eventually, the Kules were forced to distress-sell the four acres of farmland purchased over the years by Roshan’s father. One of the moneylenders took the land.

Many nights, the family went to sleep hungry. And many nights, the fear and anxiety did not let them sleep.

By 2023, every available family resource had been absorbed into repayment. Yet the debt persisted.

The family today survives on the salary of Roshan’s wife Rohini, an anganwadi helper, his father’s pension, and the daily wages earned by his younger brother Amol.

Rohini says Rs. 5,500 of her Rs. 7,500 salary goes into repaying microfinance loans.

“Majha parivar sukhi parivar hota ji [My family was a happy family],” says Roshan’s father Sadashiv, walking slowly with the support of crutches. “Ya lokanni pura lamba karun dela amhale [These people turned us into paupers].”

Across Vidarbha, informal moneylending operates parallel to the formal banking system, and was found by several committees in the past to be one of the driving causes for farmers’ suicides. Official records capture only fragments of the real rural credit economy. Loans taken for emergencies, weddings, livestock treatment, or other sundry needs rarely appear in agricultural lending data. The crisis becomes individualised although it is deeply structural.

Even in this case, the accused moneylenders ran an expansive lending racket in open daylight; tens of farmers and small businesses borrowed from them allegedly at spiralling compound interest and unlawful terms and conditions. The police found that the accused had accumulated land and other properties in Chandrapur district over a short period.

Roshan’s case made headlines in local newspapers and youtube videos, drawing widespread condemnation and cries for strict punishment to the accused.

Early morning of November 2025, Roshan’s wife Rohini attempted suicide.

“I felt the pressure and thought death was the only escape,” she says.

Luckily, Roshan woke up hearing the chair beneath her fall as she tried to hang herself from the ceiling. “Both of us cried that morning,” he says quietly.

The next day, the family approached a local television reporter in Chandrapur through a common acquaintance and narrated their ordeal on camera. The report was aired. The SP, Sudarshan, took note of the report and met Roshan. A formal FIR was finally registered at Bramhapuri police station. Arrests followed. Roshan alleges that he had approached police earlier but was ignored.

But long before the police intervened, when there was no land left to mortgage, no jewellery left to pawn, and no relatives left to borrow from. But Roshan thought he had found a new way out. Somewhere outside Minthur, beyond the familiar circuits of loans, repayments, and recovery agents, another network was waiting with what appeared to be a final solution.

Nudged by the moneylenders, Roshan found it on Facebook. He just had to hit the ‘join’ button.

Read The Minthur Series: Part II – Farmer hounded by loan sharks to sell kidney

Read The Minthur Series: Part III – Kidney sold; farmer walks into Laos job trap

If you are suicidal or someone in distress please call Kiran, the national helpline, on 1800-599-0019 (24/7 toll free), or any of the helplines near you.