Abstract:
World's largest number of blind people are in India. Of the 37 million
people across the globe who are blind and 216.8 million having moderate
to severe visual impairment (MSVI), 14 million are from India and is
expected to rise to 15 million by 2020. However, the burden of global
blindness continues to increase. As per WHO 80% of all causes of visual
impairment are preventable and about 90% of the world’s visually
impaired live in developing countries. The goal of “World Health
Organisation” and “International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness”
is to eradicate avoidable blindness and save about one hundred million
people from becoming blind across the world. As per the Rapid Assessment
of Avoidable Blindness (RAAB) conducted under the National Programme
for Control of Blindness and Visual Impairment (NPCB &VI) by the
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare India, Karnataka is among top five
states for visual disability. The reasons for high figures in India are due to
large population base, increase in ageing population and semi-tropical
location of the country, lack of public awareness, orthodox beliefs and
economic constraints added to this is the lack of medical infrastructure,
qualified eye surgeons, inequitable distribution of eye surgeons with one
eye surgeon to 2, 50, 000 patients in rural areas as compared to the one
eye surgeon to 20,000 patients in urban areas. The problem of avoidable
blindness and vision impairment continues to be escalating rapidly and is
a major public health issues in India. Challenges like rising population,
lack of infrastructure, lower income level and below poverty line
population and significant number of aged people, it becomes difficult for
the government to provide health care to all.
Description:
Fourteenth Biennial Conference on Entrepreneurship/ Edited by Rajeev Sharma, Sunil Shukla, Amit Kumar Dwivedi & Ganapathi Batthini
