Mumbai: An idea to penalise blood banks/centres by Rs 1,000 a day for not uploading blood stocks appears to have worked wonders in the state, as banks/centres now regularly update numbers, leading to transparency and wastage prevention.

Blood banks/centres in the country were asked to update details of stocks on a portal called eRaktkosh, a centralised national database to show blood availability in 2019.

In Maharashtra, banks/centres were asked to share the data with the State Blood Transfusion Council (SBTC) to be uploaded on their website.

However, despite reminders, few blood banks/centres uploaded data on these portals, leaving the state and national bodies with no way to gauge stocks and predict impending shortages.

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Therefore, the state public health department issued an order on December 2020, stating that blood banks/centres in Maharashtra would be fined Rs 1,000 a day if they failed to upload details of their available units by 10 a.m.

That notification turned things around, said Dr Arun Thorat, assistant director, SBTC. "After we started strictly implementing it and collecting the fine, almost 100% of blood banks/centres began to upload their daily data by noon," he said.

In the past year, nearly Rs 50 lakh was collected from blood banks/centres as a penalty. The amount gradually started reducing as most blood banks/centres filled the data on time.

"Without the data, we have no way to find out how much blood is sitting, say in a blood bank /centre in Jalna, and whether there is demand for that blood in a nearby district," Thorat said.

Maharashtra has 358 blood banks/centres, including private and public, of which 56 are in Mumbai. Stock positions are also visible to common people, making it easier for them to locate blood in /times of emergency.

Vinay Shetty of the NGO Think Foundation, which regularly gets calls for blood units, said bloodstock availability is no longer opaque.

"During the pandemic, we moved stocks from Solapur to Mumbai to prevent it from getting wasted. We came to know about the excess stock because of this data-sharing," he said.

While the data sharing is finally working, a blood bank/centre in charge, who didn't wish to be named, said SBTC should ensure people are not underreporting numbers to hoard stocks.

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