We seem to be really poor at documentation. We have a hoary history of “karna parampara”, that is, an oral tradition, where much of knowledge was passed on orally, and not committed to paper.

However, in today’s world, the imperfect oral tradition (remember the party game where the first guest whispers one sentence to the next person, who whispers it into the neighbour’s ear and so on…at the end of the round, the original sentence takes on some weird form!) should give way to proper documentation

Proper documentation (eg. registration of car licence plates across India) will be a great boon, as information will be easily traceable.

This being so, it is sad to see some database that is not getting built up at the right time.

Some time ago, all autos in Bengaluru were asked to display the driver’s details in a laminated sheet. I have taken the photograph of one such laminated sheet; I have blurred it deliberately to protect this particular person’s privacy:

The sheet gives the auto driver’s name, address and so on, and this is a praiseworthy attempt to document all such details.

But the sad thing is there there IS a very important category in the sheet, and that is the driver’s blood group.

And this, in *every* auto that I have seen, is blank.

To me, this is such a critical piece of information. In an accident, it could very well mean the difference between life and death to the auto driver.

It would have been such a simple task to get everyone to fill up the data about the blood group when they were filling up the rest of the form. But some bureaucrat, in his wisdom, decided that the information was not needed.

How sad that someone took the trouble to design this data sheet and yet some information is not entered.

I have written to the Regional Transport Authority asking them, when further sheets are being filled in and submitted, to ask the drivers to mandatorily fill in the blood group as well.

I have also written to them that all driving licences should necessarily carry the licence holder’s blood group as well as other information.

I wonder whether this will be enforced….