India is getting better at collecting blood. Blood centres reported 1.27 crore units collected in 2023 and a record 1.57 crore in 2025, a rise of about 24% in two years.1 Over the same two years, reported discards went the other way: from about 8 lakh blood components to 17.4 lakh. The single biggest reason given for throwing blood away was that it had expired.
That is the wastage paradox. Blood is donated, tested and processed at real cost, then thrown away on a shelf, while somewhere else a patient's family is still phoning around for a unit.
First, read the numbers carefully
The two headline figures don't measure the same thing. Collection is counted in units of whole blood. Discards are counted in components. A single whole-blood donation is usually separated into two or three components (red cells, plasma, platelets), so 17.4 lakh components is not "11% of all blood". The honest reading is narrower and still serious: collection grew by about a quarter, while discards more than doubled.
Some discards are unavoidable and correct. A unit that tests reactive for an infection must be destroyed. A bag that is under-collected, clotted or damaged can't be used. Those discards are the system working. Expiry is different. An expired unit was safe, usable blood that simply didn't reach anyone in time.
Why blood expires on the shelf
Every component has a clock, and the clocks are short:
| Component | Typical shelf life | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Platelets | About 5 days | Stored at room temperature with constant agitation. The most perishable thing a blood bank holds. |
| Red cells | 35–42 days | Depends on the additive solution in the bag. Long enough to move between sites, if someone knows it's there. |
| Plasma (FFP) | Up to a year, frozen | Rarely expires, but only if the freezer chain is kept and recorded. |
Short clocks alone don't explain a doubling. Four operational patterns do most of the damage.
1. Blood is collected where donors are, not where patients are
Donation camps follow colleges, offices and community events. Demand follows hospitals, trauma centres and thalassemia day-care units. A bank that runs a large camp can end up holding far more of a blood group than it can issue before expiry, while a bank a few kilometres away is short of the same group. Without a shared view of stock, neither knows about the other.
2. The national picture is out of date
India has a national inventory platform, eRaktKosh, built precisely so that stock can be seen across banks. But around 22% of blood banks rarely or never update it.2 A shared view is only useful if it's current. When a bank has to type its stock into a second system by hand, that update is the first thing to slip on a busy day.
3. The newest unit gets issued first
The right rule is first-expiring, first-out: issue the unit that will expire soonest, as long as it's suitable for the patient. On paper registers and spreadsheets this is hard to follow. The unit at the front of the refrigerator is often the newest one, and nobody sees the older unit quietly running out of time behind it until the day it expires.
4. Nobody is warned in time
A unit that has five days left can be moved to a partner bank, offered to a hospital with scheduled surgeries, or prioritised for issue. A unit with five hours left usually can't. Most expiry is discovered at the daily stock check, when it's already too late to act.
Expiry topping the list points to blood being collected in one place and needed in another, with no shared view of stock to move it in time.
Where the discards land
The five states that reported the most discarded components in 2025 were Uttar Pradesh (2.40 lakh), Maharashtra (1.87 lakh), Kerala (1.44 lakh), Rajasthan (1.21 lakh) and Tamil Nadu (1.09 lakh).1 These are also states that collect a lot of blood, so a high number partly reflects scale, and partly more honest reporting. But it also shows the problem isn't confined to regions with weak infrastructure. It happens wherever stock is large and visibility is poor.
Meanwhile, in eight northern states, researchers found only about 0.6 units of blood available per 1,000 people, against a WHO benchmark of 10 donations per 1,000, and only about a quarter of people living within 30 minutes of a blood bank.3 Wasted blood in one district and missing blood in another are the same problem seen from two ends.
What a blood bank can actually change
None of the fixes are exotic. They are mostly about knowing, in real time, what you hold and when it expires.
- Track every component to the unit, not the batch. "We have about 30 O+ red cell units" isn't enough. You need to know which 30, and each one's expiry date.
- Issue by expiry date, enforced by the system. When staff pick a unit for crossmatch, the software should offer the soonest-expiring suitable unit first and make choosing a newer one a deliberate decision.
- Get near-expiry alerts days ahead. An alert at 72 hours gives time to move a unit. An alert at expiry only gives you a discard form.
- Plan camps against current stock. If a bank is already heavy in a group, a camp that week should be redirected or scaled down, or its surplus should be arranged with partner banks before collection starts.
- Share surplus and shortage with nearby banks. Lending units between sites only works if both sides can see the stock and track the unit after it leaves.
- Update eRaktKosh automatically. If reporting to the national platform happens as a side effect of normal work, it stops being the task that gets skipped.
How RedHalo approaches it
This is the problem RedHalo BBMS was designed around. Every component is tracked to the unit under its Donor Identification Number, from collection through separation, storage and issue. RedHalo Connect broadcasts a shortage to partner banks the moment stock drops, and tracks units lent out so nothing goes missing between sites. The eRaktKosh Sync module reports stock to the national platform without anyone re-keying it.
Software can't create donors, and it can't make platelets last longer than five days. What it can do is make sure a usable unit is never thrown away just because the right person didn't know it was there.
Sources
- Collection and discard figures, including state-wise discards: e-Raktkosh data tabled in the Rajya Sabha (Unstarred Question 1882, 4 Aug 2026), summarised by Factly.
- Share of blood banks that rarely or never update the national platform: Observer Research Foundation (Oct 2025).
- Supply and access in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh: BMJ Global Health (Oct 2024).