Person holds a blood donation bag while hand presents red heart symbol showing vital organ donation to save a life.
Before 2016, finding blood in India was largely a phone-based, network-based, personal-connection exercise. A patient's family would call the hospital blood bank. If they were out of stock, they would call another. Then another. They might spend hours calling numbers from a printed list, not knowing which banks had stock, which were operational, or which had the specific component needed.
Blood existed somewhere in the city. But finding it required knowing who to call, and being lucky enough to reach them before the patient's condition deteriorated.
eRaktKosh changed this.
Launched in 2016 by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and developed by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), eRaktKosh — meaning "blood repository" in Hindi — is India's centralised blood bank management system. It connects blood banks across the country on a single digital network, making blood availability visible, searchable, and traceable in real time.
By 2025, eRaktKosh connected over 4,260 licensed blood centres across India and had integrated a Blood Bank Discovery Service that allows hospitals and patients to locate compatible donors and nearby inventory through citizen-facing applications.
eRaktKosh operates across three interconnected domains:
The platform's most immediately useful function for patients and families: check blood stock at any blood bank across India in real time.
By selecting state, district, blood group, and component (whole blood, packed red cells, platelets, FFP, or cryoprecipitate), anyone can see which blood banks near them currently have stock of what they need — and how many units are available.
This transforms a situation that previously required 15 phone calls into one search. In emergency situations, this time saving is medically significant.
eRaktKosh maintains a national calendar of blood donation camps. Donors who want to find a camp near them — by state, city, or district — can search for upcoming drives and plan their donation visit.
This function is integrated with the mobile apps, making camp discovery accessible from a smartphone.
The platform provides location-based blood bank discovery — finding the nearest blood bank to your current location or a specified address, with distance, contact information, operating hours, and navigation directions.
eRaktKosh allows voluntary donors to register through the platform, creating a national donor database that blood banks and patients can access when searching for specific blood types in emergencies.
The Health Minister of India directed all states to use eRaktKosh as the single point of record for donor information and real-time blood stock — centralising what had been a fragmented, institution-by-institution system.
Blood banks, hospitals, and NGOs that organise donation camps can register their camps on eRaktKosh, making them discoverable by donors nationwide. This is how the national camp calendar is populated.
Via website (eraktkosh.mohfw.gov.in):
The results show the last updated time for each blood bank's stock data, so you know how current the information is.
Via mobile app (Android and iOS):
The eRaktKosh app, available on both platforms, provides the same functionality optimised for mobile use. Features include:
The app is integrated with UMANG (Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance) and Paytm for additional accessibility.
eRaktKosh's 2025 expansion integrated a Blood Bank Discovery Service — allowing patients and hospitals to identify compatible donors and nearby inventory through citizen-facing applications, not just institutional portals. This moved the platform from primarily a blood bank management tool to a patient and donor-facing service.
India's 2026 Blood Transfusion Roadmap has digital integration as a central pillar. Key planned developments:
Biometric Traceability via ABDM: Integration with the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) will link blood donation records with biometric identity — creating a secure, portable donor history that follows a donor across blood banks and states. This prevents identity duplication and builds a lifelong donor record.
Rare Blood Donor Registry (RDRI) Integration: The national Rare Donor Registry will be integrated with eRaktKosh, making rare blood type donors findable through the same national platform that searches standard blood stock.
NAT Testing Tracking: As Nucleic Acid Testing expands across India's blood banks, eRaktKosh will track NAT status of units — enabling hospitals to specifically request NAT-screened blood.
Full District Coverage: A key 2026 target is 100% of India's 766 districts having a functional, eRaktKosh-connected blood centre. As of 2025, approximately 10% of districts still lack a functional blood centre entirely.
eRaktKosh has transformed urban blood banking. Its impact in rural and smaller-town settings is more uneven.
Digital participation is uneven. In metropolitan centres, blood banks update stock data frequently and the system reflects near-real-time availability. In smaller charitable institutions and rural blood banks — where connectivity is limited, staff are fewer, and digital literacy varies — stock data is updated less consistently or not at all.
Integration compliance is incomplete. As of 2025, not all licensed blood banks are fully onboarded onto eRaktKosh's BBMS (Blood Bank Management System) platform, limiting real-time monitoring in some regions.
The platform solves visibility, not supply. eRaktKosh can show you every blood bank within 100 km that has your blood type — but if none of them have stock, the platform cannot conjure blood that was never donated. Digital efficiency amplifies the impact of voluntary donation but cannot substitute for it.
A Medical Buyer analysis (November 2025) described eRaktKosh's situation clearly: "Digital participation is uneven; compliance with data updates is robust in metropolitan centres, while rural charitable institutions often face connectivity barriers, gaps in digital literacy, or resistance to integration."
eRaktKosh and TheBloodApp serve complementary functions in India's blood access ecosystem:
eRaktKosh is the government's institutional platform — connecting blood banks, managing inventory, tracking camps, and providing regulatory oversight.
TheBloodApp is the community platform — connecting individual voluntary donors directly with patients and blood banks in need, enabling real-time urgent donor alerts, and building the registered voluntary donor community that eRaktKosh's blood banks draw from.
TheBloodApp's integration with eRaktKosh data means that urgent blood requests submitted through the app can check institutional stock while simultaneously alerting registered voluntary donors. If a blood bank has stock, the patient is directed there. If not, the donor alert goes out to the community.
Together, these systems represent what India's 2026 blood transfusion roadmap aspires to: a digital-first, citizen-engaged blood system where no patient loses time searching for blood by phone, and no willing donor is unreachable when their blood type is urgently needed.
Download TheBloodApp and register as a voluntary donor. Bookmark eraktkosh.mohfw.gov.in for blood availability checks. Use both platforms — they work together to close the gap between India's willing donors and its patients in need. To find donation camps and blood banks near you, call the number listed in TheBloodApp.
Sources: eRaktKosh MoHFW — Official Platform | C-DAC — eRaktKosh Description | ResearchGate — Digital Transformation Blood Banking eRaktKosh 2024 | Medical Buyer — Blood Banking in Transition 2025 | Medindia — India's 2026 Blood Plan | WHO India Blood Safety 2024 | Wikipedia — Blood Donation India
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