India has only 12,000 ophthalmologists and 8,000 optometrists to treat the over 15 million blind cases and out of which three million are children. Whereas, there is only one eye surgeon per 100,000 people in the country as per the latest figures available with the World Health Organization.
The country needs 40,000 optometrists and at least 60,000 ophthalmologists to handle the increasing number of eye disorders to prevent blindness. There are 153 million people who require reading glasses but do not have access to them. There are only 20 optometry schools in the country generating 1,000 optometrists annually.
The shortfall in optometrists has also led to lack of faculty to teach at the schools. Not only that, there are only a handful of students taking up ophthalmology as a specialization after MBBS, stated Dr AR Aruna, professor ophthalmology and director, Minto Hospital and Ophthalmic Institute.
In the wake of the acute shortage for optometrists, the 12,000 ophthalmologists are undertaking eye check ups for glasses and not able to focus on the surgeries to prevent blindness, she added.
It is crucial that ophthalmologists focus only on surgeries and optometrists take on the onus of diagnosing sight related errors, recommend lenses or glasses and prescribe drugs or nutritional supplements to strengthen sight which will help to manage or control and blindness, stated Dr Ganesh, director, Nethradhama.
According to Rajat Goel, managing director and CEO, Eye-Q an ophthalmic chain of hospitals, the shortage of specialists is acute at the macro level, but in the micro level, ophthalmologists have a preference for group practice over private practice based on a revenue sharing model. However, there is a need to promote ophthalmology in post graduation to counterbalance the deficit of ophthalmologists.
More than 75 per cent of the 15 million of blind people could have avoided blindness, if the country had the right number of specialists to diagnose failing eyesight. There is also a serious lack of awareness in eye donation too, pointed out Dr Sri Prakash, superintend, Minto Hospital. The Central government's national programme to control blindness is gearing up to eliminate blindness by 2015 and the WHO target is 2020, he added.
According to Karnataka Ophthalmic Society, there is an increasing number of corneal blindness and there is a shortfall of 2.5 lakh donated eyes. Only 10,000 corneal transplants are conducted annually in the country. Right now the 110 eye banks in India store around 25,000 eyes and 7,500 of these are in poor condition and cannot be utilized for transplant. In Karnataka, 28,000 eyes were collected in 2005-06, of which 12,000 were used for transplant.
"Eye is the only organ which can be donated within six hours after death. But there are certain problems like lack of initiative on the part of the relatives of the dead person even if he had pledged his eyes after death to inform the authorities for eye donation. The whole procedure also takes 15 minutes, stated Dr Bhujung Shetty, Chairman Narayana Nethralaya.