Amid the ongoing ethnic crisis gripping Manipur, 38-year-old Delhi-based social worker Kiran Verma, who is on his 21,000 kilometres walk across three countries to spread awareness on blood donation, reached the state capital Imphal. Verma began his challenging walk from Kerala's Thiruvananthapuram on December 28, 2021, a time when the COVID-19 pandemic wilted in the country, as per a press release.
“So far I have covered 17,800 kilometres through 230 districts across 18 states and union territories and reached Imphal on Wednesday,” Verma said on Friday, adding that after Imphal, he will move to the state’s Churachandpur district before walking through Mizoram, Tripura and other parts of northeast India.
“This walk is going to be the longest blood awareness campaign ever by an individual in the world, which will run for more than two years. My mission is to spread awareness about blood donation among people so that nobody should die waiting for blood in India after December 31, 2025,” Verma said.
As COVID-19 voluntary blood donation in India has gone down significantly in the last three years, Verma said his walk is also to encourage around five million people to donate blood so that the blood banks and hospitals do not run dry, it said.
With the prolonged violence that Manipur has been witnessing for the last seven months, Verma requested the people to save lives and donate blood whenever and wherever possible. Highlighting certain breakthrough activities during his mission, he said on June 19 this year, he walked in three nations, Bangladesh, India and Nepal, on a single day through West Bengal's Siliguri corridor, a unique record made by any Indian, the release added.
To support his walk, 126 blood donation camps have been organised in different parts of the country through which over 26,722 units of blood have been collected. Verma also encountered a battery of ill-started incidents during his lone walk mostly in streets along the jungles. Over 9,000 individual blood donors have also donated at different blood banks across India and abroad to support this campaign, it said.
On September 15, 2022, Verma inaugurated a blood bank named after former Prime Minister of India PV Narasimha Rao in Telangana's Hyderabad. Ahead of his current campaign, Verma founded two organisations, under which he runs two programmes 'Simply Blood' and 'Change With One Meal'. Simply Blood, Verma says, is the world’s first virtual blood donation platform. It connects blood donors and seekers for free. The platform was launched on January 29, 2017, and so far it has saved over 70,000 lives through blood donation, the release said.
In 2018, Verma also travelled 16,000 kilometres across India covering more than 6,000 kilometres on foot only for the same cause.
Verma further said that over 12,000 people fail to get blood in India every day, due to which, more than three million people died waiting for blood. If five million youth start donating blood, then there will be not even a single death due to the non-availability of blood in India. Recently, every person must have gone through a plasma crisis during the second wave of COVID-19. Also, there is a huge blood shortage in blood banks across India as people are scared of donating blood at hospitals. It all happened because people do not have a culture of donating blood in India.