Human organ transplantation is among the most operationally demanding processes in modern healthcare. It combines a severely constrained supply, a highly perishable resource with limited viability windows, time-critical logistics, multi-stakeholder coordination, and complex allocation decisions made under uncertainty. This work examines organ transplantation in India through the lens of operations management, using the data published by the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO), the apex body in India for organ registry and allocation. It maps the transplant pathway as a service-and-supply-chain system and identifies the principal operational bottlenecks: a structural dependence on living donors, a chronically thin deceased-donor base, acute regional concentration of donation, and fragmented logistics. Between 2013 and 2024 India's total annual transplants increased from 4,990 to 18,911, yet deceased donors stood at only 1,128 in 2024 and the deceased-donation rate remains below one per million population. The article argues that India's organ transplant gap is, to a substantial degree, an operations- and systems-design problem.

Keywords

Healthcare, Lean Operations, Organ Transplantation, Process Design, Product-Service System, Theory of Constraints, Time-Critical.