Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu today stressed on the need to encourage voluntary eye donation, and said this "sublime ethos" must be inculcated among children in schools.
There was a need to involve the Panchayati Raj institutions and urban local bodies, besides enlisting the support of private sector and NGOs to augment the Central government's efforts to provide comprehensive eye care services, he said.
Eye doctors and surgeons will play a very important role in this, even as there was a need to devise multi-pronged strategy for strengthening preventive and curative eye care, he said in his address at the 32nd Intraocular Implant and Refractive Surgery Convention here.
"We also need to encourage people to voluntarily pledge eye donation. I am happy that NPCB (National Programme for Control of Blindness) has set a modest target of 50,000 eyes donation in the year 2017-18 and against this, we have achieved 69,343 eyes donation," he said.
This was a very encouraging trend, he said, and urged higher targets be set and achieved in this regard in the future.
"The sublime ethos of helping a vision impaired person to gain eyesight through voluntary eye donation must be inculcated among the young children in the schools," he said.
Naidu also said the mass media can play an important role in popularising eye donation.
Ruing the changing lifestyles, he said there was little physical activity in the modern days, and urged the people, especially youngsters, to focus on physical fitness.
"It is no secret that eye ailment is a major problem among the young children. We feel pity to see young school-going children wearing spectacles."
He further said, "the younger generation especially must focus on some kind of physical activity."
Naidu said there used to be an impression that urban school children were more prone to eye ailments but that even their rural counterparts are "suffering from myopia."
On the Centre's
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