Inside India’s largest test-tube baby maker
UDAIPUR : It is a busy Monday morning at the Udaipur centre of Indira IVF Hospital Pvt Ltd. Inside the four-storeyed grey-stoned building, you can sense the high tide of hope. A sea of greying couples patiently wait—around the security desk, at the reception, in the seating areas.
Round banners, hanging from the ceiling on every floor, inform them of a milestone: “Celebrating 125,000 successful IVF pregnancies". IVF is short for in-vitro fertilization, the process of fertilizing eggs and sperm outside the human body, in a lab. The embryo is then transferred inside the uterus.
Since the fertilization process takes place in a glass or plastic container, with the test tube being the most commonly used apparatus in a biology lab, the babies born out of an IVF procedure are colloquially called ‘test-tube babies’. Forty-five summers ago, on 25 July 1978, Louise Joy Brown was born in Manchester, England. She was the world’s first baby to be conceived through IVF.
Ever since, the procedure has been the last hope of couples when other infertility treatments fail. At the Indira IVF centre in Udaipur, this writer met one couple who travelled all the way from Delhi, 732 km away. The husband is 47; the wife 42.
They have been married for 14 years but had no luck with a child. They already have a failed experience at an IVF clinic in Delhi but still remain hopeful. One of their relatives, in her 50s, managed to conceive at this centre.
Such stories have played a critical role in making Indira IVF the largest such chain in the country—by some distance. Upon inaugurating the second clinic in Pune, in March this year, the hospital’s tally totalled 116 centres across more than 80 cities. In comparison, the second largest chain, Nova IVF
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