India has largest blind population

Latest statistics reveal India to be the new home for world’s largest number of blind people accounting over 15 million of the 37 million people in the world.

While there is an acute shortage of doctors, India only has 8,000 optometrists when it actually needs more than 40,000. Shockingly 75% of these cases are avoidable blindness.

According to Ajeet Bhardwaj, outgoing president of the Asia Pacific Optometrists Organisation, India has 12,000 ophthalmologists who have no time to conduct blindness–preventing surgeries because they are flooded with general eye check–up of patients.

"For India, it is vital that ophthalmologists focus on surgeries and optometrists take charge of primary eye care refractive errors like presbyopia, contact lenses, low–vision aids and vision therapies. This is how most developed countries managed to control and eliminate avoidable blindness," quoted a secular news Bhardwaj saying.

The report also noted that India needs 2.5 lakh donated eyes every year –– while they only manage to collect a maximum of 25,000 eyes from over 109 eye banks, of which 30% can’t be used.

"Better trained professional optometrists will immensely help India as it will give us time to concentrate on surgery, our primary specialisation. Anyway India has just one eye surgeon per 100,000 people. At present, patients come to us even for eye power check–up. The government also needs to standardise optometric education to maintain quality," Bhardwaj added.

The Union health ministry to control blindness and corneal disorders has launched a national programme which is expected to reach its blindness elimination target of 0.3% by 2015, five years before the WHO deadline of 2020.