1. Objectives of the Practice:

In our Country, there exists a considerable gap between availability and demand for blood. In most of the situations, valuable human lives cannot be saved due to unavailability of blood or blood donors. The initiative of the University to incentivize blood donor students mainly focused on this urgent need of the society as well as to inculcate the values, which will make them responsible citizens. The major objectives of the practice are –

An average sized healthy human has about 5 liters of blood in the body. The external blood supply is urgently needed in major medical surgeries as well as accidents and other trauma conditions. ‘There is no alternative to the natural blood’ is the universal truth that we experience every day. Always, there is a deficit between blood collection and demand, irrespective of geography, prosperity, and population size.

There are many challenges in increasing the blood donors:

To deal with the above listed challenges the University has initiated this practice, which is called as “Blood doNATION” as a positive step.

            Blood donation has been considered as the most auspicious of donations, which not only inculcates the values towards caring others but also provides substantial support to humankind otherwise not possible with any wealthy contributions. Keeping in mind the central idea of inculcating service to the nation, “Blood doNATION” activity was initiated in the year 2014 with a formal resolution passed by Management Council of the University. The activity was gracefully conducted with voluntary participation of student-teacher community. Blood donation at a govt. recognized blood bank is also considered for the award of additional marks. The university incentivized the initiative by providing the benefit of 02 additional marks for the purpose of passing, getting exemption or adding to the total marks secured by the candidates donating blood. 

This activity has given motivation to various stakeholders to organize ‘blood donation’ camps.

The accrued benefits of the activity include:

The initiative of the University is thus unique and novel, where the environment inspires the students to become ‘voluntary blood donors’. These students get personal satisfaction, self-esteem as well as pride by altruism. In addition to these, they get reward of 02 marks.

The most intangible benefit of this practice is that as per the medical criteria for donating blood suggest that the donor should be a healthy person. Popularization of the practice indirectly takes the young community into a safer and healthy lifestyle in their sensitive stage of life.

This novel practice has been institutionalized with the passing of a special ordinance by the University for the purpose. The ‘Student’s Welfare’ section of the University serves as nodal agency. It prepares a faculty-wise list of beneficiary students (donor who got reward of w additional marks) and gives to ‘Examination section’ for implementation.

‘Sharing of life through blood donation’ is mostly get motivated by altruism. The blood donation activity aimed at saving an anonymous person’s life requires a ‘will’ that drives the donor to this act of generosity.

The university has promoted the Colleges and Campus Schools to organize ‘blood donation camps’. On most of the occasions, these blood donation camps were connected with celebrations of birth/death anniversaries of our role models e.g., Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, Swami Vivekanand, etc. and with NSS camps. This has been found as the most effective way in motivating the students to go for ‘blood donation’ as this act gets connected to the ‘philosophy’ of a legend.

Good participation of students can be considered as the ‘evidence of successes’ of this practice. The activity not only gives 02 marks but also, most importantly; gives proud tag of ‘blood donor’, ‘healthy person’, ‘patriotic individual’ and ‘person with sharing attitude’, which makes takes them a responsible citizen.