Human Resource in India

The need for curing blindness is a most pressing one. Millions of blind people are left to cope alone when their sight fails. They are at a high risk of accidents, poverty and social exclusion because of inadequate social support. But about 2 million blind in India have a possibility to see if we join hands to fight the scourge of corneal blindness. Every year over 30,000 corneally blind victims get added to this.

By some estimates there are about 8 million deaths in a year in India. And even if one fifth of these eyes were retrieved, the corneal blindness would be completely wiped off from India within a single year. At present most eyes get wasted after death as sometimes relatives of the deceased person are not aware about the possibilities of eye donation or sometimes due to lack of information about how eyes can be donated and whom to contact. Even the rate of conversion of eye donation pledges into real eye donation is extremely low.

Let us understand that corneal blindness has a near definite cure by way of corneal transplant which is done from the eye tissue given by one human to another after his death. All of us are equally empowered to give the 'gift of sight' to two blinds.

Death is unfortunate but an inevitable truth of Life. But we can turn the 'end of a life' to a new beginning for two other lives.

All religions support eye donation.

Status of eye donation in India

In India , there are approximately 13 million blind in both eyes and 8 million blind in one eye , which is about one fourth of the total blind population of the world . This means 14.9 out of every 1000 people in India are blind compared to just 3 per 1000 in the developed countries. Blindness in most cases is avoidable that is, either preventable or curable. 2 million of India's population suffering from corneal blindness, mostly children in their early childhood can be cured by corneal transplantation.

However there is a severe lack of donor eyes in India. According to Eye Bank Association of India, the actual number of eyes collected by their member eye banks in the year 2002 (January to December) was 19352. Whereas 2 million persons were already waiting to be cured and to this 30,000 new victims of corneal blindness get added every year. So there remains a huge gap between the demand of corneas and its supply.
Although there are enough qualified surgeons and plenty of potential patients, corneal transplantation cannot be carried out due to lack of donor corneas.