Sightsavers Launches Bangalore Urban Eye Care Project and Partners with Essilor

Sightsavers is proud to announce its partnership with Essilor Vision Foundation (EVF) under which EVF has offered to dispense glasses to the marginalised society living in the slum community of East Bangalore. On the occasion, Sightsavers also partners with Nayonika Eye Charitable Trust (NECT) on a significant initiative to reduce the eye health issues around avoidable blindness in some of the most deprived areas of East Bangalore. This eye care initiative termed as ‘Amrita Dristhi – Bangalore Urban Eye Care Project’ aims at creating an effective and scalable model to deal with common eye related issues like Refractive Errors (RE), Cataract and Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) in the slum regions. This initiative would help strengthen the availability of eye care services in the low income group within a span of two years thereby reducing the occurrence of avoidable blindness. A low cost device called 3netra from a private health care firm Forus would be used for screening purposes. As a result, both direct and indirect cost of screening would reduce making it available to both rural and urban poor. This device also connects primary care centres to secondary or tertiary care centres through telemedicine for remote diagnosis.