Dia Hadid

We connected over a crackly Zoom call.

She asks we only use her first name.

Of course, her work isn't legal.

Ruby says she had a dead-end job at a New Delhi call centre and wanted to make more money.

Her friend talked her into selling her eggs and then Ruby realised she could make more as an agent.

We hear it's common for women who age out of selling their eggs to turn to this hustle.

Each month, Ruby gets about a dozen requests for egg donors, mostly over WhatsApp.

Ruby says clinics mostly want women who are educated, light-skinned and pretty.

She finds them through her networks and social media.

Ruby will find a donor, agree on a price, get their details.

Sometimes she directs women to their scans, arranges their daily hormone jabs, lines up their egg retrieval.

Clinics pay Ruby.

She takes a cart between $50 to $100 and then passes the rest on.

She says her recruits are mostly poor.

They've got alcoholic husbands.

They're single mothers.

They've got money problems.

This is Prabha Khodaswaran, a professor of law at King's College in London.

She's filed what's called an intervention in India's Supreme Court to demand women get legally compensated for the work of producing their eggs.

So she says, why not the women who enable the industry to exist?