Connected by blood

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It is not difficult to find young students involved in social activities these days as everybody wants to give back something to the society. But sustaining an initiative for long requires proper planning, time and perseverance.

BloodConnect, an initiative to collect blood from college campuses to fulfill the requirement of blood at hospitals and at other places, is an initiative started by IIT students three years ago. The students involved in the programme celebrated their anniversary recently in the capital. The initiative has now reached more than 20 colleges of Delhi University and the students involved in it believe that it’s the hard work and dedication of all the students involved that has made it so successful.
Nitin Garg, founder, BloodConnect, says that the idea of a helpline — BloodConnect — started when he got a request for blood from a friend. He went from door to door in the hostel, finding donors to help his friend. “I was amazed to see such a positive response from all the students. It made me realise that we needed a proper channel for students to actually participate in such causes and help people out. That is when we started BloodConnect as an online helpline. Later, we brought about a lot of changes in our model, our plan of action, to actually tackle the problem of blood shortage,” says Nitin.
Now, many colleges in the capital have a BloodConnect team. Stuti Gupta, a student of Hansraj College who works for the initiative, says that it has been an enriching experience working for the welfare of the society.
The initial phase of BloodConnect was just a helpline started by a few students of IIT but later with the help of the NSS team it grew. Utkarsh Kawatra, cofounder, BloodConnect who was roped in after the initial phase, says that in the first six months while building a database for the helpline, they met some experienced people working in the field of blood donation and realised that just a helpline is not a permanent solution.
“The problem of shortage of blood in the blood banks is not addressed by a helpline. Need-based emergency demands will automatically end if there is enough blood in the bank. With this thought, we decided to focus on blood donation camps as well. IIT came first and soon other colleges joined the cause,” he says.
Now, they have a proper system to conduct blood donation campaigns at regular intervals in different colleges and a data bank of donors. In the next five years, they are looking to expand across the country. “Our target is to reach 90 colleges with over 15,000 units to be collected in a year,” says Utkarsh.
The team also plans to bring all stakeholders in a city to process together so that the coordination between various stakeholders improves to such a level that no person has to run from pillar to post in search of blood.