INDIA

With one of the largest populations living below the poverty line in the world, India is home to 15 million people who are blind. Tragically, 90 per cent of cases are preventable or treatable.  

In India, 65 per cent of eye surgeries occur in the private or voluntary sector, while only 35 per cent are provided in government hospitals. Through our partnership with India’s government at the national and state levels, we are helping make primary care available to more people through India’s primary care system.

In India, where Operation Eyesight is approaching its 60^th year of operations, we are working in communities in 90 districts across 17 states. Our partnership with 35 hospitals and 144 vision centres enabled our teams to declare 14 villages avoidable blindness-free in India in 2021. 

In 2021, we screened more than 1.3 million Indians for eye conditions through our partner hospitals, vision centres and community outreach, enabling us to perform nearly 150,000 sight-saving eye surgeries. By creating a local primary eye care workforce in communities and equipping facilities with ophthalmic equipment and tools, our donors and partners are building capacity for India’s health system. This approach has also allowed us to bring quality, sustainable eye health care to the most underserved rural patients and advance our goal of eliminating avoidable blindness in India. 

In the last five years, Operation Eyesight has trained a team of 7,117 local health workers, including community health workers and eye care professionals such as ophthalmic staff and physicians, empowering them to be local eye health champions in their own communities.  

Our work in India falls into four thematic programming areas: Health System Strengthening, Vision Centres, Community Eye Health, and Maternal and Child Health. 

Learn more about our work in India.