A deceased-donor liver transplant program must precede a living-donor program.

Liver transplantation is now a well-established therapeutic procedure for patients suffering from endstage liver disease. In the last few years, partly as a response to increasing demand for organs and partly as a result of improved technical expertise, livingrelated liver transplantation (LRLT) has emerged as an option to the traditional deceased-donor trans­ plant procedure. In most countries the living-related procedure has been introduced against the background of longstanding, active cadaveric programs, and the large majority of transplants are still performed from deceased donors. However, there is now a trend in some countries including India to initiate programs based mainly on the living-related procedure. Whilst this trend has already been established in some parts of the world, in the Indian context where liver trans­ plantation is still in its early days, this is an oppor­ tune time to examine whether it is the right way forward.