BANGALORE, INDIA – It’s 5:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, and four children are at a center to receive free blood transfusions in Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka state. The three boys and one girl have thalassemia, a group of inherited blood disorders.
Three of the children are asleep at the spacious center after receiving tests mandatory for the transfusion earlier in the day. They are woken up to receive the blood they need.
Needles pierce their hands, but their faces glow with radiant smiles and twinkling eyes. They shake visitors’ hands with much affection.
Two of the boys are brothers from Bangalore, Kumar Geeta, 8, and Anand Geeta, 4. Their mother, N.G. Geeta, 28, says that both have thalassemia and need frequent blood transfusions.
Akshata Hajeri, the counselor at the center and its lone full-time volunteer, opens reports showing that Kumar has had 66 transfusions at the center, and Anand has had 27.
Kumar and Anand’s father is a rickshaw driver, and paying for blood transfusions for the two children would be expensive for the family. Geeta says that she is very satisfied with the care provided to her children at the center.
Parvathamma, 11, is the lone girl patient at the center today. Her mother, Mahadevamma, who declined to give their last name, says they came to Bangalore just to receive care.
“We come from very remote place, and there, no doctors knew much about this disease,” she says of her daughter’s blood disorder. “So I went to other hospital in Tamil Nadu. There I got information about this free day care center.”
She says it would be difficult for the family to afford treatment otherwise. Her husband is a coolie, a low-wage laborer.
“We get free blood transfusion,” she says. “We do not need to pay money or give replacement of the amount of blood given to my daughter.”
The hospital where the center is located collects only 10 rupees (20 cents) from the patients as a registration fee, Hajeri says.
The center was created by Sankalp India Foundation, a youth organization through which volunteers work for the social and national welfare of their fellow Indians. Thirty young professionals and college students run Sankalp, which means “determination, thought and aim” in Sanskrit, says Rakesh Dhanya, a volunteer.
He says the organization emerged when a group of students watched a patient die because of an inability to receive blood.
“Sankalp was founded by a bunch of engineering college students in 2003,” he says. “The engineering college was next to a hospital. One night when they were having tea at a tea stall outside their college, they saw poor family members of a dying patient begging for blood on the streets.”
He says this sight broke the students’ hearts, motivating them to exhaust their contacts to obtain the blood required for the dying patient.
“However, the patient died before the blood was arranged,” he says. “From that moment on, those dedicated and compassionate group of individuals decided that in future they will do their best to ensure that not a single person dies due to the shortage of blood.”
Dhanya says that doctors usually detect thalassemia within five years of birth. Most of the patients at Sankalp’s center are children, with 80 to 100 children receiving free blood transfusions there each month and six to eight patients visiting for care per day. But he says the center also receives a few adult patients who have been fortunate to live for that long with thalassemia.
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