He walks not in ‘vein’, but for a cause. Kiran Verma, founder of Simply Blood, an application that mobilises blood donors in India, stopped by Kolkata on March 26. Due to Covid, voluntary blood donation in India has gone down in the last three years and the Delhi-based social worker is on a 21,000-km walk across India to spread awareness about blood donation. My Kolkata caught up with the man on a mission…
My Kolkata: Welcome to Kolkata. Can you share a lesser-known fact about the city and its longstanding connection with blood donation?
Kiran Verma: Kolkata is the first Indian city where blood donation took place. It happened at the All India Institute of Hygiene & Public Health in College Street in 1942. The blood bank within the College Square institute is still being managed by the Red Cross. Such an initiative being undertaken pre-Independence is an unparalleled legacy, which I am trying to continue across India.
At the Kolkata Blood Camp, 2023
Tell us more about your walk.
I started the walk on December 28, 2021, from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, and since then have traversed across 10 states, 163 districts and two union territories. Initially, I had planned to travel 21,000 km, which meant commuting from one state capital to the other, but as I plan on covering more districts and even visiting countries like Bangladesh from Kolkata, naturally the distance will increase.
Can you share an instance of how your story inspired others?
While I was in Dadra and Nagar Haveli, I got to know of a tehsil consisting of 17 villages, whose residents had never donated a drop of blood in their lifetime. I stayed up all night sharing my story with them.
I told them about the time I had donated blood to a random family, but later got to know that what I did free of cost was a money trap for a helpless wife forced into prostitution to pay her husband’s rising medical treatment cost. The individual who had asked me to donate had charged a certain amount of money in cash from the wife for my voluntary services.
This story sparked such urgency to do the right thing, that among the village youth, three travelled 25km to their district headquarters to donate blood.
At the Dadra and Nagar Haveli camp
How close are you to the personal goal of ‘no deaths due to shortage of blood by December 2025’?
Awareness is a requirement to achieve my goal alongside the need for growing bureaucratic support, and establishing proper infrastructure. All this is essential for this dream to become a reality. I want to be the biggest voice for blood donation in the world.
With my on-foot interactions with masses in the tribal belts of Odisha to the citizens of Mumbai, I have understood that our country is massive and houses diverse people and ways of life. So, the only way for country-wide change is involving everyone in my one mission — let the blood flow not in vain but to save others in pain. The goal is far from fruition, but my pace towards achieving it has hastened.
Have you observed a change of mindset since you began walking?
Before kick-starting my blood donation campaign on December 28, 2021, I believed that people were not even aware of the need to donate blood. With every step I took across places like Somnath, Pune, Bengaluru and Thrissur, it became clearer that everybody, including the rickshawallah, realised that ‘Rakt Daan is Maha Daan’. I feel that once the gap in supply and demand is negligible, the outcome would be free-of-cost blood availability.
‘I want to be the biggest voice for blood donation in the world,’ says Kiran Verma
Could you highlight an interesting tale revolving around people you've met along the way?
In Nagpur, I was staying in an area known for its notoriety. Even the hotel management warned me to not step outside and enter certain lanes close to the hotel after 11pm. Putting on the shoes of an adventure seeker, I visited the lane at night to find an old man beating a young lady. To stop this act of violence I asked him, ‘Kasa kai’ (‘How are you?’ in Marathi) and offered to buy him desi liquor from an off-shop located 10 footsteps away.
Suddenly, I found myself interacting with him till 3am whilst being surrounded by the young rebels that flocked the shady lanes of Nagpur. Having introduced myself as someone who was walking for the cause of saving lives through blood donation, I had somehow managed to hook their attention and gain their trust. I told them about how blood is required for treatments of cancer and cardiovascular surgery, while also sharing information about a blood camp I was organising at a college in Nagpur.
To my surprise, five of the guys I was talking to showed up on the college doorstep to donate. This reinforced my belief that a voice with clear intent and unshakable conviction is always heard.
What are some of the biggest hurdles or fears regarding blood donation?
The problems around blood donation are the innumerable excuses people give when it comes to acting on a set of beliefs. In India, we witness many acting as pioneers of enforcing fundamental rights, but the emphasis on our moral duties as fellow human beings is missing on a large scale.
Very few people in our country know that donating blood is also helpful to the donor. Medically, it's been proven that over time, your blood quality starts falling, which could result in blood clots. But for someone who regularly donates blood, old tissues find a way out of your body and fresh blood seeps in. This lowers your chances of facing cancer, sugar and heart-related problems. When people are faced with such hard facts, any fear around donating blood vanishes.
Screenshots of the app
Tell us about the Simply Blood app…
The Simply Blood app works on the same lines as Uber. One can place their blood request, and people in that vicinity, who wish to donate their blood can do the same. The details of which blood bank to donate to are all available in the application. Currently, there are 3,00,000 active users on Simply Blood.
How do you finance the campaign? How can people support your work?
I manage to pick up freelance gigs to do with marketing and branding. Other than that, my full-time focus is on this blood donation mission. I don't take any private funding, all the support I have been offered is through my own family and a close-knit circle of life-long friends. The only way people can truly help me is by donating their blood.
