Thursday, 5 April 2012

World’s largest web based blood data bank launched

ALIGARH: Last year 75-year-old Sudarshan Bhatia lost her yougest son 36-year-old Lt Col Nitin Bhatia in an Army helicopter crash in Sikkim. The tragedy shattered her life, but she chose to fi ght on, like her son. She decided that she would do something that would give a fresh lease of life to millions of patients. And that was how the idea of launching a project to develop the world’s largest web based data bank of blood donors was born. The project ‘India Blood Group pages (IBGP)’ was launched today by an 90-year-old woman in the city where Nitin Bhatia was born and brought up. The work is being done by the Nitin Bhatia Memorial Trust headed by Ms Bhatia. Every year, the country requires about 4 crore units of blood, out of which only a meager 40 lakh units of blood are available. Every two seconds someone needs blood and more than 38,000 blood donations are needed every day. The India Blood Group pages(IBGP)’pages, to be known as directories, have been divided citywise. To begin with the Aligarh Blood Group Directory(www. ibp.in/aligarh) will be developed. Work for Ambala Blood Group Pages (www. ibgp.in/ambala) is also being initiated. These directories will carry names, addresses and blood types of thousands of people (city wide). Once on the web, details could be found through the user-friendly, front end, web-based browser. “There are many more blood group directories on the web in India but the idea is to enhance the user-friendly base. These directories are a very good attempt but we wish to organise the data in much more effi cient way. Current data is either very small in numbers or is extremely diffi cult for individuals to get a hold of,” said Yogesh Bhatia, elder brother of late Nitin Bhatia. Yogesh, a product of Aligarh Muslim University, lives in Canada now, and mother lives in the US. Both have come here to launch the project. He said the project would be taken in most populous cities of India which are 192 in numbers but they would choose around 150 cities out of these 192 based on actual requirement and usefulness of the project. The project in Aligarh and Ambala was a pilot project, and they were assuming an average cost Rs 5 lakh for one city, he said. It will take almost 10 years to compile data for 150 cities. Very interactive software was being developed and once compiled this data would be available for direct use by common man. The costs will be towards organising camps, publicity, development of data based software for internet (work has started in Delhi.), testing of blood groups, precamp, lectures in various schools and putting work on web (cost of hosting and web site development) etc, he said. At present the costs are being met by the family out of their own savings, he said. Such kind of city specifi c directory will be very useful at the time of emergency if the blood type was not available in the bank at that moment, said Yogesh.

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