Eye Mitras. Correcting vision in rural India

‘Eye Mitras or technicians trained in the basics of eye-care promise to bring a visible change to the vision capabilities of the rural poor.

About 3,300 Eye Mitras are now operating in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka. The target is to create an army of 10,000 such technicians by 2020 in the country

The ambitious project is driven by Essilor, the 170-year-oldglobal eye-care company under its 2.5 NVG (New Vision Generation) programme. Launched in 2013, the project began with data from Boston Consulting Group that 4.5 billion out of the 7.2 billion global population then required vision correction.

Essilor decided to address the concerns of the affected 90 per cent of whom reside in developing nations, especially India, China and the poorer Asian and African countries. Of these, the majority were concentrated in rural areas. The multinational took up a strategy of mass screening, training of rural youth, providing basic toolkits and facilitating the creation of Eye Mitras.

According to Milind Jadhav, Head India of Essilor’s NVG initiative: “We provide Eye Mitras free one-year training, support to open an optical shop, and a toolkit so that they can undertake the tasks.”

For this, 30 training centres to churn out EMs have been established. In the last three years about 30 lakh people have been screened and 30 per cent provided spectacles. So far the mission has been fully funded by Essilor. The aim is to establish an innovative, scalable, sustainable and profitable mode and not a corporate social responsibility model, Milind, who was here to attend the World Council of Optometry meet, explained to BusinessLine.

The targets for the next three years are to train another 6700 EMs, screen 18 million people and provide them with spectacles. The cost of each pair of spectacle ranges from ₹350to ₹600.

“We are working on multiple fronts: collaborate with eye hospitals (300 at present), use Mobile Refractive Vans for mass screening (21), rope in Vision Ambassadors like Bank Mitras, tie up with NGOs like International Vision Institute, Sight Savers and Orbis, and rely on wholesale distribution channels,” he said.

To accelerate the progress, tie-ups have been forged with the National Skill Development Corporation in UP and B-ABLE (Basix Academy for Building Lifelong Employability), an initiative of BASIX Microfinance, for screening and training in UP and Maharashtra.

However, the massive initiative is threatening to negatively impact over 20,000 qualified Ophthalmic Assistants working at public health centres across the country, argues Arjeet Singh of the Punjab unit of the National Ophthalmic Association. “The government is also not helping and on the contrary has diluted our duties, stopped the two-year ophthalmic assistant diploma course in several medical colleges. Thus rendering our skills futile in helping even as the refractive problems in rural areas in turning into a huge burden,” he says.

Further, Singh said, the vision technicians being trained by private hospitals for one year after class X and allowed to do screening and optometry work “have emerged as a direct threat to us”.

The Government had started the diploma course in 1978 to reduce the incidence of blindness from 14 out of every 1,000 population then and provide skilled help in rural areas to rectify simple refractive errors. The Association is demanding its rightful role in reaching out to the people with vision problems through the PHCs, said General Secretary RS Berwal.

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