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Twenty-four-year-old Vimlesh Devi has been a surrogate mother for two years. A mother of three and a homemaker, she lives in south west Delhi’s Kapashera colony. For Delhi-based documentary filmmaker Ishani K Dutta, it was the impulse to bear children for money that became the focus for her documentary Womb On Rent.

“It is almost a tragic comedy when you look at how easily women can be exploited for the lure of money,” says Dutta, whose latest documentary looks at the organised business of commercial surrogacy in India through the eyes of a surrogate mother in Delhi. She also examines the current medical laws. “Behind all the donors, the statistics and the commissioning parents, there is a human side of the story that is ignored,” says the 46-year-old-filmmaker.

Womb On Rent was screened at the Mumbai International Film Festival in February and also during the recently concluded 10th IAWRT Asian Women’s Film Festival in Delhi. The 52-minute film begins with the journey of Devi and her husband, who works as a security guard, in their one-room apartment. We see the...