Orange - a ray of sight - project to eliminate avoidable blindness

Rotary District 3232, Rotary Club of Madras East, Rotary Club of Irvine and the non profit Aravind Eye Care System partner in setting up a cluster of  8 Vision Centers in North Chennai, India as a part of a national initiative to eliminate avoidable blindness. The centers are expected to serve a population of almost half a million people.

39 million people are blind in the world (statistics for 2010 as per WHO in their ‘Universal Eye Health - A Global Action Plan 2014-2019’). Of these, one fourth live in India. The common causes of blindness in India are Cataract, Uncorrected refractive errors, Glaucoma, Diabetic Retinopathy, Corneal Opacity etc. 80% of all blindness is avoidable. With 200 million people needing eye care in India, less than  10% are covered through existing health care facilities and eye screening camps (A VISION 2020: The Right to Sight INDIA Publication - Dec 2011)

VISION 2020 - A Right to Sight - India’ is a national forum along with World Health Organization (WHO) and International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) for eliminating avoidable blindness, that aims to establish 20,000 Vision Centers in India.

While the total cost of the project is…