Hyderabad: For a Hyderabad couple who had waited more than a decade for their families to accept their relationship, the news arrived on an otherwise ordinary morning in June 2020. The husband was reading one of Telangana’s most-circulated Telugu dailies when he came across the report. He nudged his wife to wake up.
“My husband showed me the news report… I felt the ground slip under my feet… There was deafening silence,” the woman recalled.
The report said that Dr Pachipala Namratha—from whose Secunderabad fertility clinic the couple had been regularly receiving WhatsApp updates, ultrasound scans and pictures purportedly tracking the progress of a pregnancy—had been arrested by Visakhapatnam Police on charges of child trafficking. When they rushed to the clinic, they found only a locked building that had been raided.
What unravelled over the months and years that followed, and with renewed urgency over the past year, was a fraud of unusual cruelty: a scheme that preyed on the desperation of couples who spent years of their lives and savings to fulfil the yearning of having a child of their own.
In Part 1 of the series, ThePrint reported how Namratha’s clinics operated for years. Investigators allege that the fertility clinics never actually used biological samples collected from couples for in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and surrogacy. Instead, newborns from impoverished families, obtained through a network of agents, were handed over to couples who believed that the child was their own.
Hyderabad Police last year registered nine cases. In total, at least 24 police cases, along with a money laundering case filed by the Enforcement Directorate, have been registered against Namratha and her associates across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
Namratha is currently in judicial custody in the ED case, having been arrested by the agency earlier this month. Her legal counsel had earlier refused to comment on the accusations, but said they will file “appropriate applications at an appropriate forum”.
Making of a racket
ThePrint reported that the scheme’s earliest documented case was an NRI couple who, in October 2014, welcomed a son they believed was born through IVF and surrogacy at Namratha’s Secunderabad clinic. The deception surfaced nine months later when a test showed that the boy’s DNA did not match that of the couple.
A case was filed in 2015, but Namratha was never arrested. She was instead charged under sections of the Indian Penal Code that were bailable offences.
The Hyderabad couple cited at the beginning of this report came to Namratha’s clinic through the same path many of her patients did: a network of agents and online searches.
The woman was diagnosed with uterine fibroids and had a miscarriage in 2013. A failed IVF cycle followed years later. By 2019, the couple had exhausted most conventional options and were searching for a surrogacy arrangement within their means.
“We searched for names and options in the city, but most quoted Rs 20-30 lakh in 2019. That was way beyond our budget, and hence, the search was a tiresome exercise,” the woman said.
Not long after, she received a call from an “agent in Delhi” who asked about her preferences and budget, which she said was less than Rs 15 lakh. “I was told it was too little and to increase it, but he eventually said that Universal Shrusti may offer one package in our budget,” she said.
A woman named Rani then called, saying she was from Universal Srushti Fertility, and invited the couple to visit Namratha’s Secunderabad clinic. They went in November 2019. After discussions about the woman’s medical history, a surrogacy package was fixed at Rs 12.5 lakh, payable before delivery, the woman said.
According to police’s investigation, the agents who steered couples to Namratha’s clinics were themselves financially incentivised. They allegedly received Rs 50,000 per newborn delivered to a couple.
At the clinic, the couple was offered choices they had not expected: options for egg donors, and the ability to specify the build, skin tone, and educational background of the surrogate mother. What they were not offered was a meeting with the surrogate, the woman said.
“We were asked about preferences on the build of the egg donor and other features such as their skin tone and education. I did not have any problem with any colour,” the woman said.
“We were told that these surrogate mothers generally do the work for money, and revealing each other’s identity may open up problems of extortion and blackmail,” she said, explaining the clinic’s stated rationale for the restriction.
By February 2020, Namratha was sending ultrasound scan images to the couple’s phone, suggesting that the pregnancy was progressing well and that delivery was expected in October that year.
Then the pandemic hit. Both the husband and wife lost their jobs. Namratha continued to send scan reports on WhatsApp, maintaining that the surrogate mother and the couple’s child was healthy.
“We were told that all surrogate mothers were kept at their Visakhapatnam clinic, which gave me nightmares because the government at the time was suggesting social distancing and other safety measures,” the woman said.
The illusion collapsed that June 2020 morning when the newspaper landed on their doorstep.
“I don’t want anyone to suffer this fate. There are many forms of cheating, but this is the worst of them all. People lose valuable items, money or sometimes assets due to cheating. This is emotionally and mentally scarring, not for the money we were duped of but for the scar it has left on us,” the woman said, bursting into tears.
The couple subsequently filed a complaint at the Gopalapuram Police Station in Secunderabad.
Another cheating case was registered against Namratha in 2021, by which point she had already shifted her operations to the Visakhapatnam centre and surrendered the Secunderabad clinic’s surrogacy licence.
Between 2002 and 2022, commercial surrogacy was allowed in India, albeit with some restrictions for foreigners and other groupings.
The couple from Rajasthan
Years later, in 2024, a couple from Rajasthan’s Jhunjhunu district arrived at Namratha’s facility, carrying the weight of their own grief after two miscarriages.
According to case documents, they paid nearly Rs 66,000 for medical tests that confirmed them to be, in Namratha’s telling, “medically fit to conceive”. The doctor allegedly steered them away from IVF, citing her claimed professional experience of over 25 years and insisting that surrogacy was the more reliable route. She also claimed a “100 percent success rate”, they said.
“She promised us that our own eggs and sperm would be used to form embryos, which would be screened and implanted into a surrogate mother arranged by the clinic, and further assured that all documentation would be handled by them, with a healthy child delivered to us after DNA confirmation,” the woman told police.
The couple agreed to a surrogacy package priced at Rs 30 lakh; Rs 15 lakh by bank transfer and Rs 15 lakh in cash, to be paid as the surrogate mother’s fee.
The Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021, prohibited commercial surrogacy involving an unrelated surrogate in India. Under the amended law, which came into effect in 2022, only a close relative of an intending couple can serve as surrogate, with no monetary compensation.
The couple, who were staying in Secunderabad by then and later moved to Delhi, told investigators they began paying the clinic in August 2024 and were put through a series of steps designed to lend the process an air of medical rigour: three months of hormonal medication to improve the “quality” of the woman’s eggs, followed by a trip to the Visakhapatnam clinic in September 2024 for collection of their biological samples.
The months that followed brought periodic reassurances. A surrogate had been found. The process was underway. A delivery was expected between 12 and 19 June, 2025, the clinic allegedly told them.
By May 2025, the couple said they had paid Rs 30.26 lakh in several transactions.
As the expected delivery approached, the husband, who was scheduled to travel abroad for work, asked that a DNA sample be collected from him before he left. On 4 June, the woman received word from an employee at the Visakhapatnam centre that the surrogate was delivering the baby through a caesarean procedure (C-section) but the surrogate’s husband was blackmailing the clinic for Rs 3.5 lakh.
The matter, the woman was told, was settled for Rs 2.5 lakh.
“On 5th June, we received news that the surrogate had delivered the baby. I was directed to a semi-constructed building in Visakhapatnam that they claimed was the new Srushti Hospital location,” the woman said, according to case documents.
There, she was shown a baby that the clinic said was her biological child. The baby was registered in the names of the couple without a DNA test, the woman said.
The deception, the couple said, came apart when they grew suspicious and insisted on a DNA test. The results confirmed the child was not biologically theirs.
The Jhunjhunu couple filed a police complaint, which swung Hyderabad Police into action in July 2025.
Police said they found that the baby given to the Jhunjhunu couple was born to a couple, who belonged to Assam, but lived in Hyderabad. The man worked as a labourer in the city.
Whose children are they?
The Jhunjhunu couple’s complaint last year forced a larger investigation into Namratha’s fertility clinics that had been flourishing for over a decade with little to no consequences for the doctor and her associates.
“The clinics never recorded the presence of the real biological parents of newborn babies at her hospitals, and the babies were directly registered in the names of the couple who had paid for the process. There are no records maintained on the actual parents of the newborn babies,” a police officer familiar with the probe told ThePrint.
Investigators said they found almost the same modus operandi across most cases related to the clinics.
The unravelling also prompted others who believed they had received biological children through Namratha’s surrogacy services to seek DNA testing.
Among them was a second Hyderabad-based couple who told police they had paid Rs 16.5 lakh for surrogacy, plus Rs 1.5 lakh for what they believed was a C-section procedure.
The process was familiar: hormonal injections—14 of them, a Visakhapatnam visit for sample collection, and assurances that all legal permissions were being handled. They were given no information about the surrogate mother, and they were told to expect delivery in June 2025.
When the baby was born and later admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) due to health complications, the couple began to notice that the child bore no resemblance to either of them. They commissioned a private DNA test.
The result was negative.
When they confronted Namratha on 22 July 2025, her response—documented in their police complaint—was striking.
“On 22-07-2025, we again met her, and she admitted that donor samples were used by mistake, making it impossible to trace the genetic parents. She acknowledged that the mistake happened in the lab and asked to return the baby so she could submit an application to the government for adoption, and that she would redo the process this time using our samples,” the complaint reads.
Investigators said they found that the girl handed to this couple was bought by a Vijayawada-based woman, Kadamala Karuna Sree, for Rs 3.5 lakh. In its submission to a court in this case, Hyderabad police described Karuna Sree as a “habitual offender” who participated in the conspiracy with Namratha.
Karuna Sree, Part 1 reported, was allegedly one of the ‘agents’ who convinced poor families to sell their newborns, who were then passed off as surrogate births to couples at Namratha’s clinics. Karuna Sree was arrested in August last year and came out of bail earlier this month.
The two children–given to the Jhunjhunu and Hyderabad couples–were admitted into government shelter homes as probes began. Of the two, the second Hyderabad couple went to a court and took custody of the newborn.
While the biological and legal parents have been identified in these two cases, investigators concede that establishing the full scale of the racket, and tracing all the children who may have been displaced, remains a daunting task.
For now, they have just one estimate go by: 286 deliveries recorded at the Visakhapatnam clinic. There may have been many more.
(Edited by Prerna Madan)
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