Prof V S Verma
Visual impairment is a significant health problem worldwide. As per World Health Organization estimates, globally about 285 million people are visually impaired, of whom 37 million are blind. It has been estimated that over 80 percent of global visual impairment is preventable or treatable. In spite of this, millions of people remain at risk of visual loss due to the lack of eye care services. With almost 90 percent of blind and visually impaired people living in low and middle-income countries, including some of the world’s poorest communities, access to eye care is often unavailable. Of the 37 million people across the globe who are blind, over 15 million are from India out of which 75 percent of these are cases of avoidable blindness due to scarcity of eye banks and acute shortage of optometrists in India and donated eyes for the treatment of corneal blindness. While India needs 40,000 optometrists, it has only 8,000. Leading causes of vision impairment are uncorrected refractive errors and cataracts. Approximately 80 percent of all vision impairment globally is considered avoidable. The majority of people with vision impairment are over the age of 50 years.
National Programme for the Control of Blindness and Visual Impairment (NPCB&VI) was launched in India in 1976 as a 100 percent centrally sponsored scheme (now 60:40 in all states and 90:10 in NE States) with the goal of reducing the prevalence of blindness to 0.3 percent by 2020. To meet these targets at national level, the government planned to set up more PHC/Vision Centers to broaden access of people to eye care facilities, extending financial support to NGOs for treatment of eye diseases like diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma management, laser techniques, corneal transplantation, vitreo-retinal surgery, treatment of childhood blindness free of cost to poor people. For meeting these targets, the Government envisaged to augment the integration of existing ophthalmic surgical/non-surgical facilities in each district, State by associating few units to next higher unit and decided to include modern ophthalmic equipment in eye care facilities to make it more versatile to meet modern day requirement and provision for setting up multipurpose District Mobile Ophthalmic Units in District Hospitals for better coverage.
As per the 2011 census, Jammu and Kashmir State has a population of around 68,000 visually impaired men and women as its citizens. However, since then the number has increased. Officials believe that the number could have increased to over 70,000. It has come to be known that the Centre had set up the target of 82,331 cataract operation of the blind during the last financial year in Jammu and Kashmir under the National Programme for Control of Blindness, but only 23,409 cataract operations were performed in the state under this scheme, obviously due to lack of facilities in government hospitals across the State. Concurrently, it also seems that the targets could not be met due to lack of a devoted will to serve the visually impaired section of the society.
In Jammu and Kashmir, a lot of philanthropic chunk of population is keen to donate cornea for people with vision impairment, but ironically, the State doesn’t have an eye bank and provision for organ donations and transplants is merely a dream. Though Jammu and Kashmir enacted it own Organ Transplant Act in 1997, it closed down its only eye bank at Government Medical College and Hospital Jammu in 2008 for reasons best known to the authorities at the helm of affairs. It may be due to creation of adequate facilities required for organ preservation and allied facilities.
Visual impairment is one of the severe and vindictive problems of old age. Although 80 percent of the visual impairments are curable, yet most of the rural population is afflicted with eye ailments and badly suffering due to loss of partial or complete vision due to repairable, but untreated cataract for there being no eye surgeons or operation facilities in the nearby Government hospitals even after more than seventy years of independence. The State Government should ensure that eye surgeons with operation facilities may be provided at all Sub District Hospitals of the State so that the poor and resourceless village population groping in darkness have better access to medical facilities gets the precious vision restored in the wake of centrally sponsored schemes to benefit the resource poor population living in remote and border areas of the State. We expect the Governor translating the dream of the poor and resourceless population living on borders and far away off places into reality of having eye surgeons posted nearer to them for getting their avoidable eye ailments treated and preventing them from groping in the world of darkness in this age of miraculous medical science.
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