Cataract Blind-free Kalahandi District

Kalahandi district in Odisha is one of the most backward districts of India. Since the year 1985, it has been hogging national & international headlines for poverty, starvation death, lack of basic medical facilities, etc. It has one of the lowest Human Development Index in the country. Recently, Dana Majhi episode (a poor tribal man carrying the dead body of his wife on his own shoulders from the hospital due to lack of money) had created a lot of hue & cry in the country. People in the district have little access to institutional medical facilities and also can not afford treatment from private practitioners there.

Currently, Kalahandi has around 10,000 blind people mostly due to cataract. Taking into account, an annual potential need of approx 6400 cataract surgeries every year. Vision India Foundation has been working in the undivided Kalahandi and its neighboring districts since last 5 years under the name “Sri Jagannath Netralaya” situated at Bhawanipatna for eliminating preventable blindness. Currently, we are doing around 4500 cataract surgeries per annum which are insufficient to clear the previous backlog & also cater to the current annual fresh need of the district.

We want to continue our flagship project “Cataract Blind free Kalahandi district” in collaboration with District Blindness Control Society which will be the first of its kind in the state of Odisha. We just concluded the initial part of this project in collaboration with SBI Foundation where 4500 patients were operated between June 2017- July 2018. As our current clinical set up in Kalahandi is insufficient to work on such a mammoth mission, we will require help from other donors to establish our own Camp hospital building at our own land which is lying idle. We will also request continued reimbursement from DBCS as well as from other donors partly for the free cataract surgery.

Blindness is the greatest tragedy and cataract is the most common cause of avoidable blindness in India. By addressing this major issue of blindness this project will help many poor blind people of Kalahandi to get their sight back which will indirectly uplift the economy by improving their quality of life. It will decrease the dependency of old blind people on their family members which will increase the productivity of family further. To achieve this target many college drop-out girls or the girls willing to work voluntarily will be recruited, empowered and engaged, which will help them to improve their livelihood