A volunteer circle
that refused to let
a child wait.

The origin

This is our story.

Sandeep and Krishna had been friends for a decade. They taught children in shelter homes, supporting a vulnerable group toward the ordinary outcomes a middle-class childhood is supposed to include. That path led them into another nonprofit, and into thalassemia. They were already blood donors.

Then COVID. Krishna came across a parent who needed blood, was not eligible to donate, and whose request had sat open for more than a week. He spoke with Sandeep. On 14 April 2020 they treated it as an emergency mission: find the donors.

Imagine a child taking a needle every 15 to 20 days, all their life. It looks sad and scary until you witness it. It was brave. That is why you see us, Blood Warriors, working for people living with this disorder.

When we started, Hyderabad reported about 3,500 patients coming to the city. Four years later that number was about 4,500, close to a 30 percent increase. It would be easy to read that as the disorder spreading. It mostly is not. Patients are living longer, so they accumulate. Screening reaches further every year, so people who were always there are finally counted. And more families reach care at all, which is the part we worked for. The number we want to fall is the number of children born with this, and that is what prevention changes, a generation at a time.