Akanksha Infertility and IVF Hospital (Anand)

Pushpa Pandye still sometimes cries when she thinks of the baby. She didn't eat for a month after she gave him up, a little boy weighing 5 lb. 4 oz. who came into the world last April in a utilitarian delivery room at the Kaival Maternity Home & Surgical Hospital in Anand, India. "He was so cute," she says ruefully. After she gave birth, she nursed the infant in her room at Kaival for two weeks. Her husband and two children met him; her eight-year-old still remembers the baby who lived in her mother's tummy for safekeeping. And then Pandye handed him over to his rightful owners and genetic parents, a couple from the Indian city of Bangalore, some 1,400 km away.hdi certificationAnother nine or 10 months from now, assuming the pregnancy "takes," she plans to go through the entire exercise again, this time for an Indian immigrant couple settled in the U.S. Already she dreads the delivery date. But her stint as a paid surrogate has given her an opportunity she couldn't otherwise have dreamed of: the chance to escape the lower-middle-class ghetto in what remains one of the most rigid class-bound democracies in the world. For her last pregnancy,iseb certificationPandye was paid 150,000 rupees, or $3,900 -- a sum that would take her years to earn in her job as a clerk at an incense store or with her occasional work as a government security guard. She used the money to purchase a two-bedroom flat. The money from the next pregnancy will allow her to send her kids to a better school -- where they can learn English and work with computers -- and then to college. Her heart's desire is that her daughter will become a doctor, or else a pilot.Pandye is a bright, high-spirited 28-year old from this town in the state of Gujarat, in the western tip of India. She possesses only a high school education -- an abiding regret, since her ambition was to become a teacher -- but her geographic location has given her an unusual and spectacularly lucrative career option unthinkable in another time: she's part of a cottage industry of Indian surrogate mothers who have given hope to dozens of infertile couples all over the world, and new life to this dusty town.Anand (population: 110,000) is an unlikely destination for a medical tourism boom. About an hour-and-a-half from the nearest airport(in Ahmedabad, an hour or so by air from Delhi or Mumbai),mcdst training it's a remote, Podunk town by Indian standards, the kind of place where mailing addresses include notes like "behind Surabhi Regency." For years the area's sole claim to fame was that it's the headquarters of Amul, the billion-dollar brand of the Gujarat-based co-op that supplies milk and butter to Indian families and was for a long time the nation's chief purveyor of cheese.