SATINDER Chohan explores the global and personal implications of India’s surrogacy industry in new play about motherhood and blood ties between women and nations.

In a surrogacy clinic in Gujarat, three women meet. It’s Londoner Eva’s last chance for motherhood. For village girl Aditi, dairy worker and single mother, surrogacy is a lifeline out of poverty – a chance to giver her own daughters a better chance in life. For clinic owner and businesswoman Dr Gupta, it’s all just another transaction. But with the backdrop of profound global forces, can it possibly remain that simple?

India has been regarded as the world’s ‘surrogacy hub’, one of a handful of countries legally offering commercial surrogacy to parents internationally, although the industry was not fully regulated. The industry was estimated to be worth over £1.5million, with surrogates themselves stated as being able to earn up to £6,000. During 2016, a change to the law was drafted so that surrogacy would become legal only to heterosexual Indian couples married for five years.

Satinder Chohan, playwright, said: "I felt compelled to write a play with surrogacy at its heart as it is such a controversial subject loaded with conflicting emotion, culture and politics. I felt connected to the subject as, with my Indian village roots, the Indian women acting as surrogates that I had read about in news stories could be any number of my female relatives or indeed myself if my parents had taken a different path in life. At the same time, I wanted to explore the wider global issue of which surrogacy is a part – the commodification of everything’ in a time when morals are easily sacrificed for financial markets and how we, as privileged Westerners and consumers rely on worker all over the world to provide the material stuff of our lives."

Made in INdia is at the York Theatre Royal, from April 7 – 8 at, 7.45pm. For more information and tickets go to www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk or phone 01904 623568.