Last month, the India Post of Sightsavers completed 50 years in the country, marking the occasion by releasing "Vision of Hope" – A special publication and unveiling the 50 Year History Wall. A global development organisation that operates across 30 countries and works towards eliminating avoidable blindness and support people with visual impairments, Sightsavers India was founded by Sir John Wilson.
Excerpts from an interview with R. N. Mohanty, CEO, Sightsavers India:
Tell us about the journey and the growth Sightsavers India has had so far.
The organisation has a vision of a world where no one is blind from avoidable causes and where visually impaired people participate equally in society. The journey has included milestones such as establishing the first permanent eye base hospital in partnership with Sitapur Eye Hospital in 1966 and being instrumental in launching the National Programme for Control of Blindness (NPCB), with which India became the first country to initiate national level programme on prevention of blindness in 1976. In 1983, we launched our first national programme on blindness, the Xerophthalmia Programme, which targeted blindness due to anaemia and nutritional deficiency, and ran across 17 projects within the country. Sightsavers was the first eye care organisation to respond to the 1984 Bhopal Gas tragedy by sending ophthalmologists, relief supplies, medicines and equipment.
More recently, we also partnered with XRCVC to advocate with Reserve Bank of India and Indian Banking Association for accessible banking and financial services resulting in installation of first Accessible ATM with voice and Braille labels. Presently there are more than 7000 ATMs across India. With help of local partners and NGOs, Sightsavers during its 5 decade journey has supported screening 55 million people; conducting 5 million eye surgeries, and 36.4 million people treatment of eye disease spectrum.
We have presence in almost 100 districts covering eight priority states of the country where the need for quality eye health is the most. We are running programmes in urban slums of five other states and treat them as learning states where we innovate and then pass on best practises to the focused ones.
What kind of challenges have you faced, in terms of support and awareness?
There are more than 12 million blind people in India. That’s about 30 percent of the world’s total blind population – most of whom went blind unnecessarily. The organisation has been able to make eye care and welfare of the blind from handful organisation to making it available for the people belonging to bottom of the pyramid in some of the remotest part of the country including 30 tribal districts.
Further, there is limited availability of optometrists and ophthalmologists in rural and semi-urban areas. Sightsavers over the years has tried to address the gap by supporting initiatives to train eye health professionals to cater to the needs of eye health in India.
Moreover, poorer sections are more affected, because they are more likely to delay going in for check-ups or eye screening. To adequately respond to the need, we work closely with state and local government bodies to create awareness at all levels.
According to the World Bank, children with disabilities in India are five and a half times more likely to be out of school than non-disabled children. Those who do attend school rarely progress beyond the primary school level. To address this Sightsavers in partnership with SSA runs education programme to mainstream visually impaired children into mainstream school
And what does Sightsavers India have in store for the future?
Sightsavers has a robust strategic plan for 2015-19. The interventions will remain to be in eight High Focus States i.e, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, in districts selected on the basis of extent of the need.
Strategy implementation will be further supported by coordinated and systematic research and advocacy for both implementation and scale-up, and by measurement of impact to ensure that the efforts are bearing fruit.
By 2020, we aim to touch one million figure for surgeries; cover 5000 schools under school eye health reaching to 500,000 students; educate 1,50,000 disabled students and train 5000 teachers, cater to 1,25,000 students under low vision initiative in our priority states.
