Fighting Blindness in India

With so many children who are blind or visually impaired, India has a unique set of challenges when it comes to eye care.

Examining and treating children requires special skills and calls for specific training, knowledge and equipment.

One of the major causes of vision loss in India for children is uncorrected refractive error. Causing blurred vision, a refractive error occurs when the eye cannot clearly focus.

Children with refractive error can face significant setbacks in learning in the classroom. This can then continue the cycle of poverty that many people with vision impairments face in India.

Over the past 20 years Orbis and our partners in India have played a leading role in:

• Training thousands of eye care professionals
• Conducting more than 18.5 million paediatric eye screenings
• Performing over 100,000 surgeries on children
• Carrying out 92 hospital-based trainings

We have been working to reach the World Health Organisation’s targets which state that there should be at least one paediatric eye care centre per 10 million people.

To reach this target, in 2023 we began working with partners on a key project in rural Odisha. The project aims to reduce avoidable blindness and visual impairment by developing affordable, sustainable, quality primary eye care services.

The project will:

• Establish five green vision centres, powered by solar energy

• Train an ophthalmologist in pediatric ophthalmology

• Conduct lots of outreach in schools, early childhood centres and through community camps