Five city residents join hands to develop app for blood donation

Sameer Singh

Tribune News Service

Bathinda, February 24

Five city-based friends have joined hands to develop a mobile application to connect needy people/ patients with blood donors.

Christened ‘Rakatdaan’ (blood donation), the app requires prospective blood donors to register themselves with their basic credentials, blood group and mobile phone number. The people/ patient requiring a particular blood group can directly contact the donor and ask for blood without any intervention/ permission from any third party. ‘Rakatdaan’ is available on Google Playstore.

After discussing the idea of introducing a mobile application for blood donation, Ravi Kumar and Varinder Singh, teachers at a city-based school for disabled children, Bunit Rajput and Deepak Saini, businessmen, and Kulwant Singh, a Health Department employee, started working on it in December 2018.

Talking to Bathinda Tribune, Ravi Kumar said “The drive behind developing the application was to find out a solution to the problems being faced by people/ patients when blood is required during treatment. We often see people/ patients requiring blood transfusion running from pillar to post, especially those who cannot afford to pay. Sometimes, no one comes forward to donate blood. Due to the grave situation, people sometimes buy it from blood banks at exorbitant rates. Anyone in the country, sitting in any city or town, can get himself/ herself registered on the app.”

“‘Rakatdaan’ is an initiative aimed at helping the needy. Apart from donors, blood banks and ambulance service providers can also get themselves registered on the app to provide services,” Kumar added.

The app was completed last week. Now, Ravi and his friends are planning to approach the district administration to officially launch it. As many as 21 donors have got themselves registered on the app already.

The developers of the app said they had divided areas in and out of the state where they would be reaching out to people to register themselves on the app. Apart from the eight blood groups, the app shall also provide the rare group ‘Bombay blood’. They appealed to people, especially youngsters, to be part of this noble initiative.