New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate on Friday, February 13, said it has arrested a doctor, who owns a Telangana-based fertility centre, on money laundering charges for allegedly running a surrogacy racket.
The doctor has been accused of sourcing infants from poor and vulnerable parents and presenting them as babies born out of surrogacy.
Dr Athuluri Namratha alias Pachipalli Namratha, the owner of Hyderabad-based Universal Srushti Fertility Research Centre, was taken into custody on Thursday as she was “evasive and non-cooperative” during questioning.
A local court in Nampally, Hyderabad, sent her to judicial custody till February 26, the federal agency said in a statement.
The money laundering case against Namratha stems from an FIR registered at the Gopalapuram police station in Hyderabad that booked her for fraud, cheating, criminal conspiracy, illegal surrogacy and child trafficking.
It was alleged that the doctor was providing childless couples with newborn babies since 2014 on the basis of a surrogacy racket that she “orchestrated through her clinic along with her employees and agents”.
She was arrested by the state police but was granted bail in the case in November 2025.
A probe found, according to the Enforcement Directorate (ED), that Dr Namratha collected “huge” sums of money from childless couples, promising a child through a surrogate mother.
To project the procedure as genuine, their gametes were collected for implantation into a surrogate mother, the agency said.
However, infants were sourced from poor and vulnerable parents who were unable to raise the children and wanted to abort the pregnancy, it said.
The agency found that a network of agents and sub-agents was involved in the racket for arranging poor and needy pregnant women. They were “lured” with money to give up their child soon after birth.
“Dr Namratha used to pay around Rs 3.5 lakh for a female child and Rs 4.5 lakh for a male child. Such deliveries were conducted at her hospital in Visakhapatnam as the license of her Secunderabad hospital was revoked by the authorities,” it said.
The birth reports forwarded to the municipal authorities were allegedly forged by the doctor and reflected the names of the childless couples as parents instead of the biological parents, the ED said.
The agency claimed that the doctor “continued” the fake surrogacy racket even after multiple cases were registered against her, and her medical license was suspended by the authorities.
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