Trustees of Shri Mahaveer Jain International Mission, Chennai donated a van to Gurpriya Vision Research Foundation, the public charitable trust of Radhatri Nethralaya tertiary eye care hospital, Chennai on Nov.15.
Rajasthan Ratna Subash Chand Ranka, Managing Trustee, Kishan Srisrimal Jain, Giresh Bhandari, Nirmal Nahar, Niranjan Solanki, flagged off the vehicle. Ranka lauded the charitable activities of Radhatri Nethralaya particularly in the field of childhood blindness prevention. Dr. Praveen Krishna, Medical Director, Radhatri Nethralaya said, that the van would be used to ferry the preterm babies of underprivileged parents with the blinding condition called Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) from the villages to Radhatri Nethralaya for free vision preserving treatment. Our team travels even upto 365 kms from Chennai to screen the babies in villages, he said.
Dr. Vasumathy Vedantham, Medical Director, Radhatri Nethralaya, said that ROP was the commonest cause of childhood blindness in middle income countries such as India. With only 150 pediatric retina specialists in India, and ROP being a predominantly rural problem, interventions like teleophthalmology and hand held retinal cameras to screen all babies in villages were needed. Project Vision on Wheels, is our signature free rural teleophthalmology project, through which more than 1 lakh 50,000 babies have been screened in rural Tamilnadu and Andhra Pradesh by handheld retinal cameras, and more than 5000 babies prevented from blindness by timely laser, injections and vitrectomy surgeries under general anaesthesia, she added.