When 14-year-old Chethan M Gowda lost his school teacher because of the unavailability of blood at the crucial moment, he thought that it was high time he do something to stop the rampant loss of lives due to the untimely shortfall of blood. “Around the same time, I had a couple of friends looking for blood donors and they found it very difficult to find any – this was back in 2015. I wanted to do something to help. I started working with blood banks by organising blood donation camps and continued that for a year. But then I realised that just organising drives wasn’t enough to solve the shortage problem in the country,” says Chethan, now 20 years old and the founder of Khoon, an organisation in Bengaluru that collaborates with hospitals and blood banks across India to help patients in need.
Started in 2016, the Khoon team first started working on helplines where people could call them directly in Bengaluru and the team would either send a donor or arrange for the required unit of blood. “By February-March 2017, we had a good presence in Bengaluru. 2000-2500 donors registered with us and the helpline was limited to the city. In August 2017, we made our first expansion to Assam. I used to work with interns mostly to conduct awareness sessions, to increase donor registrations online. I had a couple of them from Assam who were very dedicated and wanted to do this there. Back then, we were the only 24×7 blood donation service dedicated to the entire Northeast,” adds Chethan, who is a third-year Mechanical Engineering student. He adds that he wants to do his master’s in social work and plans to completely concentrate on Khoon, post his education.
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