NEW DELHI: Daksha, a shy Gujarati woman in her early 30s, wants a child — but not for herself. The baby is for the “Britishers”, the couple seated in the lobby of the Indian fertility clinic. It is the first time that the British Asian couple, Ajay and Saroj Shah, from Leicester, have met Daksha. The 31-year-old is “loaning” her womb to them for 150,000 rupees (£2,000) and is candid about needing the money. Her shop job pays only 2,000 rupees a month.

She says her friend was a surrogate mother. “She was paid well. I am not rich so the money will help me a lot. I have no problem bringing joy to this family. I do not need another child. I have two of my own.” For the Shahs, who have spent six years and £60,000 on fertility treatment in Britain with little success, the mixture of money, science and light regulation in India has reignited the hope that they will finally have children.

The British couple appear to be part of a flourishing trade in reproductive tourism in India, which has a more relaxed attitude to paying women for pregnancy, a practice prohibited in many other countries.

Indian clinics report that the incidence of surrogacy has more than doubled in the past three years, with the demand driven by fertility requests from abroad and the decision by some professional women to delay trying for a family until their late 30s.

The treatment is becoming big business in India and is worth about 20bn rupees (£250m) a year. The increase in requests from abroad is partly fuelled by the relatively cheap costs. At about £3,000 in Britain, an IVF cycle costs five times what you might pay in India. In addition, in Britain, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has outlawed payments, but a surrogate can be reimbursed for a maximum of £10,000 to cover expenses; the payments often fall between £4,000 and £10,000.

India’s newspapers have highlighted the trend with reports of couples from Europe and East Asia making flying visits in search of surrogate mothers.

One case picked up by papers concerned Lin and David Lee, a Singaporean couple, who compared California prices — in their case for egg donor, fertilisation and surrogate payment — with the costs in Mumbai. They opted for the Indian clinics to save 2.5m rupees (£31,000). The Lees are now expecting a baby through a local surrogate. The Shahs, who are both in their 40s, decided to turn to surrogacy when British doctors told Mrs Shah that she could not bear children. The couple had not considered India, until they began to find it difficult to get an Asian egg donor in Britain.

“We were at the desperate stage, both of us are not getting younger,” says Mr Shah. “We met a doctor from India who came to give a talk about surrogacy. She [said] it is easier to get an Asian donor here. So we decided to give it a try.”

Six months later the couple attended Kaivla hospital, in Anand, in the West Indian state of Gujarat — a hospital that has found seven surrogate mothers in the past 18 months for British and American couples of Indian descent. The clinic finds surrogates and matches them with prospective parents in India and overseas. Doctors track the progress of the surrogates and keep the paying couples informed.

The hospital’s medical director, Nayna Patel, says she has 20 surrogates, including a family where a mother and her three daughters have each given birth to children for strangers. However, she says that convincing healthy mothers to take part is still difficult.

“You see, Indian society is still quite conservative and questions get asked. So often these women will just move out of the local area to have the child,” she says.

Apart from the lower costs of surrogacy in India, there are other factors drawing patients from abroad. Indian medical guidelines allow doctors to implant five embryos into a surrogate mother; in Britain, the maximum is two and many European countries are moving towards a single embryo transfer.

In India, the surrogate mother’s right to the child is not given the same importance as in the West — she signs away her rights to the baby as soon as the child is born. By contrast, British law says that a surrogate mother who has provided the egg can claim the baby as her own at any time during the first two years of the child’s life.

“It is a big relief for the foreigners who come to us,” says Dr Patel. “The whole experience places a strain on the couple and they do not want to be worrying about these things too.”

However, campaigners in Britain question the ethics of such businesses. “What is missing here is a debate about not protecting the rights of the surrogate mother,” says Susan Seenan, of Infertility Network UK. “It does not matter where you are — in the UK, US or India — giving up a child is a terribly emotional issue. We have seen that here in Britain and I am not sure the Indian system has addressed that.”

What is being created is a global baby industry that is regulated nationally, leaving loopholes that can be exploited by customers willing to travel, she adds. The Indian medical research council, which oversees medicine in the country, does not have any guidelines to deal with foreign clients using Indian surrogates. But a study is being prepared to assess the issue.

Officials at Britain’s HFEA say there is little that can be done. But British immigration law does provide some restraint, as any child born to an Indian woman would not automatically get a British passport. Dr Patel says that this problem came to light in 2004 when she helped an Indian grandmother have a baby for her British daughter whose dreams of motherhood were fading because of a rare genetic condition.

“They had twins but it was not until late last year that they were given British citizenship. It was a difficult time for everybody,” says Dr Patel. They had been refused British passports because they were born in India and their host mother was not a British citizen.

A spokesman for the British High Commission in Delhi said that families who sought surrogate mothers in India should contact immigration officials to “better understand the process”.

This cuts little ice with the Shahs. “This is our last chance to have a family,” says Mr Shah. “We will manage some way, even if we have to adopt our own kid.”

The names of the patients and the surrogate mother have been changed. AT A GLANCE:· There are two forms of surrogacy. Sometimes the surrogate mother provides the egg, which is fertilised by the intended father. In other cases, an egg of the intended mother may be combined with the sperm of her partner or donor sperm, meaning that the baby has no biological connection to the surrogate mother.

  * In India, single women can act as surrogates, although they cannot use assisted reproductive therapy to become pregnant on their own account.

  * The debate over surrogacy in India erupted 10 years ago when Nirmala Devi, who wanted money to help her care for her disabled husband, offered “to rent her womb” to her employer in Punjab. Since then surrogacy in the country has quietly become accepted.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service