The Complete History of Blood Donation in India — From 1939 to 2025
India's relationship with blood donation is longer and more layered than most people realise.
It begins in Kolkata, in 1939, in a small room at the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health — before India was independent, before the National Health Service existed, before there was a government policy about blood at all.
It runs through a World War, a social reformer's grief, a public interest litigation at the Supreme Court, a global health crisis, and a prime minister's declaration in a tribal district of Madhya Pradesh.
It ends — or rather, does not end — with 14.6 million units of blood collected in a single year, and an app on your phone that can connect you to someone who needs your blood type right now.
Here is the full story.
March 1939. At the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health in Kolkata, West Bengal, Shiv Deval Singh Greval establishes India's first blood bank, managed by the Red Cross. The bank's initial donors are government employees and members of the Anglo-Indian community — small in number, motivated by humanitarian conviction.
This was before independence. Before partition. Before the institutional health infrastructure of the republic existed. A blood bank was an act of foresight in a country that had not yet formalised the practice.
The Second World War created India's first organised blood donation drive. Soldiers wounded in the Pacific and Southeast Asian theatres needed blood. Blood donors were needed to supply them.
Government employees and others donated. The spirit was one of wartime duty and humanitarian response. When the war ended, that spirit faded — and without the urgency of war, blood banks reverted to paid (professional) donors.
The lesson was not lost on everyone.
Leela Moolgaonkar did not set out to change India's blood system. She was responding to something personal: her son was injured, and blood was needed. The experience of searching for blood in an inadequate system shook her.
She started organising voluntary blood donation drives in Bombay (now Mumbai) from 1954. She went community to community. She spoke at colleges, neighbourhood groups, and civic organisations. She made blood donation a social act — something people did together, as citizens.
This was India's first sustained voluntary blood donation movement. It predated national policy by decades.
The 1960s saw voluntary donation efforts spread:
Blood banks opened across India's major cities. The infrastructure was fragmentary, inconsistent in quality, and still heavily dependent on paid donation — but it was growing.
In 1971, Dr. J.G. Jolly — Emeritus Professor at PGIMER Chandigarh — co-founded the Indian Society of Blood Transfusion and Immunohaematology (ISBTI) alongside Mrs. K. Swaroop Krishen.
This was the first professional institution in India specifically dedicated to blood transfusion medicine. It gave the field academic credibility, a national platform for advocacy, and the organisational structure to campaign for systemic change.
Dr. Jolly would go on to become the most important single figure in India's voluntary blood donation history.
On October 1, 1975 — Dr. Jolly's 49th birthday — the ISBTI declared October 1 as National Voluntary Blood Donation Day. Dr. Jolly chose to mark his birthday not with celebration but with a call to action.
The government subsequently adopted this date formally. October 1 is still observed annually as National Voluntary Blood Donation Day — now 50 years after its founding declaration.
The HIV pandemic that swept through the 1980s arrived in India and changed the blood banking conversation permanently.
Blood transfusion — then largely based on unscreened paid donors with significant infection risk — became a known route of HIV transmission. The catastrophic consequences of infected blood transfusions created urgent pressure for reform.
This was not just a public health emergency. It was an ethical reckoning. Blood that was supposed to save lives was spreading a fatal infection.
The HIV crisis led directly to the establishment of the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) in 1992 — following a Supreme Court verdict in the Common Cause vs. Union of India writ petition.
NACO became the institutional home for blood safety policy alongside the newly constituted National Blood Transfusion Council (NBTC). State Blood Transfusion Councils (SBTCs) were established in every state.
For the first time, India had a national regulatory architecture for blood banking. It was incomplete and imperfect — but it was there.
A Public Interest Litigation was filed in the Supreme Court in 1996 to abolish the practice of selling blood — the professional donor system that had persisted for decades and was closely linked to blood safety failures.
The verdict was decisive. The sale of blood was formally prohibited, effective January 1, 1998. Blood banking in India became, legally, a voluntary and non-commercial domain.
The transition was not smooth — voluntary donations were still too low to immediately replace paid donation volumes, and there was a temporary blood shortage. But the legal foundation for a safer, more ethical blood system had been established.
The National Blood Policy of India was adopted in 2002 — articulating for the first time a comprehensive national framework for blood safety, voluntary donation, blood bank regulation, and clinical use of blood.
Simultaneously, NACO adopted the WHO Guidelines on the Clinical Use of Blood. These moves aligned India with international best practice and set the aspirational targets that subsequent decades would work toward: 100% voluntary donation, universal testing, and equitable access.
The sustained IEC (Information, Education, Communication) campaigns of this period produced measurable results:
These numbers represent millions of individual decisions — by students at NSS camps, by corporate employees at CSR drives, by community members responding to awareness campaigns — to give rather than wait.
The eRaktKosh platform launched in 2016 — a centralised, web-based blood bank management system developed by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare through C-DAC.
For the first time, blood banks across India were connected on a single digital network. Donors could search for nearby blood banks. Hospitals could see stock at other facilities. Blood donation camps were listed and tracked nationally.
By 2025, eRaktKosh connected over 1,131 blood centres across India — with real-time stock data available to any smartphone user.
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was the most severe stress test India's blood system had faced since the HIV crisis.
Lockdowns stopped blood donation camps. Fear of visiting healthcare facilities reduced walk-in donations. Blood collection dropped — 12.7 million units collected in 2020, lower than projected. The pandemic revealed, again, the system's structural dependence on institutional camp-based donation and its vulnerability to sudden disruption.
India's blood banking community adapted — adding safety protocols, enabling digital requisitions, and maintaining supply chains under extraordinary circumstances.
In June 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission in Shahdol, Madhya Pradesh — a tribal district with high SCD prevalence. The mission committed to screening 70 million individuals and expanding access to treatment for a disease that affects millions of India's most vulnerable citizens.
The mission's success depends in part on a reliable voluntary blood supply for the patients already living with the disease.
In 2024, India collected 14.6 million units of blood — meeting the estimated national demand for the first time. Voluntary donation reached 74.55% of all collections. India's Rare Donor Registry (RDRI) was launched with 4,000+ screened donors.
These are genuine achievements. They are also incomplete ones. Blood deserts persist across northern India. Seasonal shortages continue. Thirty percent of blood still comes from replacement donation.
The story of blood donation in India in 2025 is a story of progress and persistence — of a system that has come a long way and still has far to go.
The history of Indian blood donation is a history of individuals who saw a gap and tried to close it. Leela Moolgaonkar saw it in 1954. Dr. Jolly saw it in 1971. The Supreme Court saw it in 1996. The government saw it in 2002 and 2016.
TheBloodApp is part of the same long effort — using digital connectivity to do what each previous generation used the tools of its time to do: connect willing donors with patients who need blood, faster and more reliably than the system alone can manage.
Download TheBloodApp. Register as a voluntary donor. Be part of the next chapter of India's blood donation history. To find donation camps and blood banks near you, call the number listed in the app.
Sources: Wikipedia — Blood Donation in India | Sankalp India Foundation — Dr. J.G. Jolly | PMC — Voluntary Blood Donation India Achievements and Challenges | NBTC India | WHO India Blood Safety 2024 | Observer Research Foundation — India Blood Supply 2025 | MoHFW — National Blood Policy 2002
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