Central India KidSight
A child who cannot see clearly cannot learn, cannot play, cannot become what they were meant to become. In Central India’s government schools and urban slums, that child — undetected, unhelped — is astonishingly common. We went to find them.
We screened 200,000 children. Here is what we found.
Launched in 2004 with a simple mission — reach every child in Nagpur’s government schools who needed an eye test — Central India KidSight quickly grew into something far larger. In 2007, partnering with ORBIS International, we set out on an ambitious programme that covered 200,000 children across urban schools, rural communities and slums.
What we found was striking. Children sitting at the back of classrooms, unable to read the blackboard for years, labelled inattentive or slow. Children with squints, amblyopia, and vitamin-A deficiency that had gone completely unnoticed. Children whose entire school experience — and early life — had been distorted by a problem that, with a pair of glasses or a simple operation, could be fixed in a morning.
What KidSight delivers
- School screening camps — government schools across the city and surrounding rural districts
- Slum outreach — door-to-door in Nagpur’s densest communities
- Vitamin A prevalence assessment — identifying nutritional deficiency driving eye disease in children
- Free spectacles — dispensed directly in the field
- Paediatric surgical care — squint operations, cataract removal, treatment of amblyopia
- Central India’s first dedicated paediatric eye care centre, established by Suraj Eye Institute
The impact — in numbers and in faces
200,000+
Children screened across Central India
Hundreds
Of children operated upon — squint, cataract, and more
2004
Programme launched — over 20 years of service to children
One memory we carry: a ten-year-old girl from a slum school in Nagpur who had been sitting in the front row because she could not see the board from any other seat. Her teacher thought she was eager. She was, in fact, nearly blind in one eye from a squint that had been missed since birth. We operated. Six weeks later, both eyes were working. Her teacher wrote to us: “She is a completely different child.”
Help a child see their future
A pair of glasses for a school child costs as little as ₹500. A squint operation — that can prevent permanent vision loss if caught in time — costs ₹8,000. A cataract surgery for a child costs ₹3,500. Your support makes every one of these possible.