No charges for blood as such can be levied by any blood bank. However, the blood that is collected from a donor at no cost needs to be processed to make it free of infection, to ensure that it has certain minimum quality standards. It also needs to be stored and tested with the recipient’s blood before transfusion.

Besides all these, establishment costs for the blood bank like infrastructure maintenance, salaries, etc. add to the overall costs of providing a safe unit of blood to the patient.

Blood banks attempt to recover these costs as service charges from the consumer.

There are some guidelines developed by the National Blood Transfusion Council and circulated by NACO, on the amount of service charge that can be charged by blood banks functioning in any sector in the country.

These guidelines specify that no blood bank will charge more than Rs.500/- for one unit of whole blood. However, since these are mere guidelines, they have no legal mandate.

Soon after setting up of the National Blood Transfusion Council (NBTC) at the Centre and State Blood Transfusion Councils (SBTCs) in each state/UTs, a complete ban has been imposed on collection of blood from paid donors, with effect from 1st January, 1998.

A number of steps were taken by NBTC to keep a strict check on exploitation of the blood users by commercial and private blood banks. SBTCs were provided funds by NBTC to mobilise blood collection through voluntary blood donations.

Extensive awareness programs for donor motivation through Information, Education, Motivation, Recruitment and Retention of voluntary donors was launched.

Each state is given an annual target for collection of blood through voluntary sources and this is regularly reviewed by NACO.