Vijayawada: A Delhi-based social worker Kiran Varma, walking 21,000 km for creating awareness among people about blood donation, reached Vijayawada on Sunday. With this, he has completed 9,700 km of his walk.
From Vijayawada, he will be heading to Visakhapatnam through the coastal districts. Incidentally, he started his journey from Thiruvananthapuram on December 28, 2021 to create awareness in India about the importance of donating blood.
Kiran Varma said his walk is the longest blood awareness campaign ever by an individual in the world, which will run for more than two years. “Nobody should die waiting for blood in India after December 31, 2025,” he declared.
The social worker explained that on December 26, 2016, he got a call from a hospital wherein one person told him that he is from a poor family in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, who needs blood for his family member. Kiran went to the hospital to donate blood. After donating blood, he met the family and got to know that the person who had called him took from them ₹1,500 for the blood that he had donated for free.
The shocking thing was that the lady who paid for his blood for saving her husband had got into prostitution for paying the medical bills.
That is when Kiran started his organisation Simply Blood. He said he has got a very good response from people of Andhra Pradesh in Kurnool, Nandyal, Anantapur, Sri Sathya Sai, Rayachoti, Kadapa, Tirupati, Nellore, Prakasam, Bapatla, Guntur and NTR districts.
The social worker said Simply Blood is the world’s first virtual blood donation platform, connecting blood donors and seekers in real time without charging anyone anything. Till date, the organisation has donated blood and potentially saved more than 35,000 lives.
