Most awareness talks end where they began: a hall full of nodding students, a round of applause, a pledge form quietly filed away. The Women’s Studies Centre at Veeranari Chakali Ilamma Women’s University chose a different closing note — a working proposal to institutionalise what the day had merely introduced.

Convened at the Prof. Pramada Devi Seminar Hall to mark National Organ Donation Day, the programme was less a single lecture than a coordinated handover: university leadership framing the moral case, a Rotarian supplying the organisational scaffolding, and a transplant coordinator dismantling the myths that keep pledge forms unsigned.

Leadership Sets the Moral Register

Presiding over proceedings, Vice Chancellor Prof. Surya Dhananjay characterised organ donation as among humanity’s most selfless acts — a single decision with the capacity to extend several lives at once. Invoking a classical Sanskrit subhashitam on compassion and service without ego, she argued that the burden of normalising this culture rests disproportionately on the young, urging students to carry the message beyond the seminar hall as informal ambassadors.

The Vice Chancellor’s address was underwritten by the University’s senior administration: Registrar Prof. Gaddam Mallesham, Dr. G. Vijayalakshmi in her capacity as OSD to the Vice Chancellor, and Principal Dr. Loka Pavani, with the entire programme convened by Dr. Rupasree Mukhopadhyay, In-charge Director of the Women’s Studies Centre.

From Awareness to Architecture

The substantive turn of the afternoon arrived courtesy of Rtn. Mohan Nishtala, District Chair for Organ Donation at the Rotary Club of Cantonment Secunderabad and a figure also associated with the NV Lakshmi Foundation. Rather than restating the case for donation, he handed students a toolkit: blogs, Instagram and Facebook reels, community flash mobs, and a menu of existing volunteer programmes students could plug into immediately.

Demystifying the Process

Where Nishtala supplied structure, Dr. Bhanu Prakash, Transplant Coordinator at the MOHAN Foundation, supplied clarity. His session worked methodically through the misconceptions that typically deter would-be donors, before walking students through the practical mechanics of registration, consent and coordination, and the often-invisible role transplant coordinators play in matching organs to recipients in time-critical windows. He closed by inviting students to register as donors themselves and to volunteer directly with the Foundation’s ongoing awareness campaigns.

Organ donation is one of the noblest acts of humanity — capable of saving multiple lives through a single, selfless decision.
— Prof. Surya Dhananjay, Vice Chancellor, VCIWU

Students Close the Loop

An animated question-and-answer session, drawing participants from both the Arts and Science faculties, preceded the day’s practical conclusion: a collective pledge in which students formally committed to championing organ donation awareness within their own communities — converting a seminar-hall audience into a standing volunteer base for the proposed Rotaract initiative.

Why This Talk Travels Beyond the Campus

National Organ Donation Day talks are, by now, a fixture of the Indian academic calendar; what distinguishes this one is its refusal to end at awareness. By pairing a Vice Chancellor’s moral appeal with a Rotarian’s organisational blueprint and a transplant coordinator’s technical grounding, VCIWU has positioned its Women’s Studies Centre not merely as a host of the day’s proceedings but as an incubator for a durable, youth-led advocacy structure — one that, if realised, would give Telangana’s organ-donation movement a permanent foothold inside a university campus.