Kidney sold; farmer walks into Laos job trap

One day in February 2025, Roshan Sadashiv Kule got a call from a friend who asked if he wanted to come to Laos to work as a computer operator. The salary was good – Rs. 90,000 to 1 lakh a month – and the company would take care of the travel and living expenses.

The friend, a man from Jammu and Kashmir who too had sold his kidney in Cambodia the previous year as part of the same group as Roshan, had just joined work there.

Roshan had done a course in computer programming after graduation, and the thought of working in an office was inviting. “The job would not be physically taxing, this friend told me, so I started considering it,” he says.

Even after selling his kidney to repay the loans, while recuperating from the surgery, Roshan was being harassed by the six accused moneylenders from Brahmapuri.

The family home had been mortgaged to four different financial institutions, the farm bought out of his father’s lifetime’s savings had been taken by one of the six money-lenders, other assets had been liquidated, and yet the loan amount stood at more than Rs. 10 lakh.

His father’s pension, his wife’s anganwadi salary, and his brother’s earnings from daily wage or farm labour were not enough. Employed for some time as a banking correspondent until he lost his job during the pandemic, Roshan had been unable to find work since.

He took the job offer.

His friend (name withheld) put Roshan in touch with a middleman who went by the name Fidi, originally from Jammu and Kashmir and now settled in Laos. “My friend told me Fidi would facilitate my transit and other procedures,” Roshan tells PARI.

There was another young friend from Chandrapur named Vishal, who too had sold his kidney and desperately needed a job. “Ek se bhale do (two, better than one),” Roshan quips.

So, in June 2025, they were aboard the flight to Laos. The route: Kolkata to Bangkok, Bangkok to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, and then a domestic flight to Bokeo province. His family knew this time that he was indeed going for a job.

On their arrival in Bokeo, Fidi took away their passports, brushing aside Roshan’s protests and telling him it was a company requirement. He made them comfortable in his room, and gave them food and refreshments.

The next morning Fidi took them to their workplace by taxi – a 40-minute drive through a winding road in hilly terrain in the middle of nowhere. “I saw several tall buildings emerging from those hills; those are the scamming compounds,” Roshan recalls. There were red, green and blue buildings.

Fidi led them to one of the building complexes, with two or three tall towers. When he saw the large office space inside a thick-and-tall-walled compound, Roshan says he was taken aback. Hundreds of young men and women, each with 10-15 mobile phones in their hands, were seated like robots before computer screens, quietly buried in their work.

“Ekdum bhayanak, bhayan vatat hote mala [It was eerie. I felt scared],” he says.

Until then, Roshan had little idea about Laos – a country of 7.6 million people surrounded by Myanmar, China, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. It is traversed by the Mekong river and known for its mountainous terrain, hill tribe settlements and Buddhist monasteries. Now he began searching on his phone.

The workplace was at a remote location in northwest Laos, he says, where a casino city has been carved out of a patch of jungle in the infamous “Golden Triangle” region – the lawless border zone of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand.

The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GTSEZ) in Bokeo province has allegedly evolved from a gambling enclave into a global epicentre for industrial-scale cyber-scam compounds and human trafficking, according to many international media reports.

Roshan and Vishal had become the latest victims of the booming online cyber-scam operations – an industry that is believed to have enslaved tens of thousands of workers from across third world countries. The workers are lured with the promise of well-paid jobs in online sales and IT industry and trapped into peddling transnational cyber-frauds.

“We would basically be duping people all over the world,” Roshan says. “From the first day, we would generate fake IDs on Facebook, become imposters, use AI tools for calling people, trapping big investors by luring them with big promises, and carrying out banking frauds,” he says. “They make workers do anything.”

Roshan saw young men and women in their twenties from Africa, India, Bangladesh and many other countries. They worked 12-14 hours a day, six days a week. They were paid the promised salaries, but were not free to return home.

“Vishal wanted to leave immediately,” Roshan recalls, “He was very scared; so was I.”

Somehow, Roshan negotiated Vishal’s release with Fidi in the first week, on the pretext that Vishal did not know computer operations as well as he himself did.

“Fidi got 10,000 Yuans [nearly Rs. 1.3 lakh] from the company for recruiting each of us,” Roshan recalls. “He demanded 10,000 Yuans for returning Vishal’s passport and allowing him to return home. We were basically enslaved. We also feared for our lives. I convinced him that he could deduct monthly installments from my salary over time and let Vishal return immediately,” Roshan says. “Fortunately he agreed, and Vishal returned home.”

Vishal would not talk to PARI for this story; he wants to forget that episode as a nightmare.

Then, Roshan somehow managed to call the Congress leader from Bramhapuri who is currently the leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra legislative assembly, Vijay Wadettiwar, on Whatsapp and sought his help. Wadettiwar alerted chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, who in turn approached the Union home ministry. The Indian embassy in Laos was alerted, which took help from local police to track Roshan and rescue him from the compound, two days after the call to Wadettiwar.

“The Laos police came with a lot of men, got my passport, returned it to me, and put me on a flight back home via Ahmedabad,” he says. Roshan landed in Ahmedabad two days after the Air India flight 171 crashed on June 12, killing 260 people on board. He had spent about a week in Laos.

His friend from Jammu and Kashmir has also returned to India, and is working in Kerala. PARI tried speaking to him, but he would not talk. He has a family to take care of, children to raise.

Back in Minthur, Roshan narrated his five-year ordeal to Wadettiwar, who listened in shock. But Wadettiwar lost his mother soon after and a police complaint did not get filed. The issue went cold, until Rohini attempted suicide in November 2025, and Roshan’s ordeal was reported by a local YouTube channel.

The police finally registered an FIR and arrested the local moneylenders as well as the accused in the kidney racket. Roshan did not mention the Laos scamming compound in his police complaint.

Wadettiwar addressed a press conference after the case was registered to demand stringent action against the accused and relief for Roshan.

The dairy farmer is now fighting legal and statutory battles for the recovery of his family’s land and gold, and the waiver of loans from financial institutions. Under the Maharashtra Money-Lending (Regulation) Act, 2014, there are provisions to confiscate the assets and hand them back to the owner. This will be time-consuming.

Roshan owes over Rs. 50 lakh to different banks and non-banking financial institutions, as well as small amounts to relatives and friends.

But he is happy that he is finally being heard.

“We as a family had been contemplating collectively committing suicide at one point,” he tells PARI. “I was scanning different options, including how to get cyanide.”

His case rocked the state legislature in its budget session earlier this year. Wadettiwar had first raised this issue in December 2025 during the legislature’s winter session in Nagpur. The Maharashtra government recently released Rs. 5 lakh aid to Roshan, and some voluntary organisations have come forward to extend financial support.

Roshan and his brother Amol want to resurrect their dairy – by filling the empty shed with cows, and turning a full circle. He has also written to the district collector and political leaders to request a government job.

There are thousands of men and women like him, Roshan says at his home, trapped in a precarious situation.

Roshan has to live with the fact that he has only one kidney. “I don’t know how it will affect me as I grow older,” he says. He would like to erase the past five years of his life.

It was in early 2026 that PARI first began investigating Roshan’s story. Now seven months later, he is slowly trying to rebuild his life with some financial aid from the government, his well-wishers, and civil society organisations.

Speaking to this reporter in August 2026, Roshan said he wants to restart his dairy, and is looking to bring new cows and buffaloes into his empty shed. The state government has recently promised to allot him five acres of farmland, a promise that Roshan hopes will bring back some financial stability for his family. He is also attending to his father’s long-delayed hip joint surgery.

Meanwhile, his regular rounds to the local police station and Chandrapur police headquarters continue. The police are still looking for the two absconding accused in the kidney-racket - Dr. Rajaratnam Govindaswamy of the Star KIMS hospital in Trichy and Subhajit Pal, an alleged middleman in Kolkata.

Roshan is in touch with others who sold their kidney. They have now become his friends.

Read The Minthur Series: Part I – A farm loan attracts organ traffickers

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

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.