Kathmandu, December 3

Nepal Netra Jyoti Sangh, a non-profit non-governmental organisation, today said it has been working in collaboration with four different organisations of Nepal, Embassy of India and 14 foreign donor agencies to increase people’s access to eye care services.

Prof Dr Tirtha Prasad Mishra, NNJS chairman, informed that US-based Orbis International was among the organisations helping NNJS in its campaign to eradicate preventable and curable blindness from the country. It has been conducting Nepal Programme for Control of Childhood blindness since July 2010.

The goal of project is help reduce blindness and visual impairment among children in Nepal.

There are 17 eye hospitals, 30 district branches and over 60 eye care centres operating under the umbrella of NNJS. According to NNJS, its main objective is to reduce preventable blindness to 0.2 per cent by 2020 from existing 0.35 per cent.

Under this programme, it has provided out-patient department service to more than 1.33 million children as of September 2015. Of them, 492,165 children were provided free medicines and spectacles. Similarly, surgery was carried out on 21,861 persons, mostly from financially poor and disadvantaged groups.

NNJS has adopted the WHO Vision 2020 global initiatives. The avoidable causes of childhood blindness in Nepal are cataract, glaucoma, retinopathy of prematurity, refractive errors and low vision.

Statistics show that seven Nepali child become blind every day and 30,240 children below the age of 15 are living with blindness.