80 districts do not have a blood bank: Govt

New Delhi, Feb 26: More than 80 districts in the country do not have a blood bank, the government today said even as it noted that most of these districts have been newly crafted.

"There is no shortage of blood banks in the country and there are a total of 2,708 blood banks in the country. There are 81 districts in the country that do not have a blood bank,"

Minister of State Shripad Yesso Naik said in a written reply in Lok Sabha. The 81 districts which do not have blood banks fall in states and UTs like Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Manipur. "A large number of these districts are new and have recently been crafted out," Naik said.

He said that National Blood Transfusion Council (NBTC) had on December 22, 2015 issued an order by which blood banks have been asked to put their stock availability status online on National Health Portal.

This has been done to ease the access of blood for patients and to increase transparency by display of stocks of blood and blood components in public domain.

Naik said that National Health Portal provides platform for display of stock status of blood in blood banks. "All the National AIDS Control Organization-supported blood banks in the country have been linked to the National Health Portal," he said.

PTI