About 3.4 million Indian children go to class with uncorrected vision, every school day, says the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB).
Children with refractive errors - such as short or long-sightedness or astigmatism - are unable to see blackboards and books, learning much less than their peers, it pointed out, against the backdrop of mark World Sight Day.
Quantifying the benefit of being provided glasses, the IAPB said, “if a five-year-old is provided with glasses in primary school and continues to wear them until they are 18, they will earn, on average, 55.6 percent more lifetime income than if they never had their vision corrected.”
The gleanings are from recent research published by IAPB, a global alliance of organisations working towards the elimination of avoidable blindness and vision impairment, and the Seva Foundation, a non-profit health organization for preventing and treating blindness and other visual impairments.
“If these children were to get glasses, India would stand to gain nearly 1.2 million years of schooling every year, amounting to a future economic productivity boost of ₹156 billion. “
“These calculations are the sum of the individual learning loss for children with uncorrected refractive error, translated into a percentage reduction in the country’s projected GDP per capita,” said an IAPB note on the research findings.
“With this very first global estimate of actual learning losses associated with poor vision, we see just how much our children could gain by getting glasses when they need them. With India standing to gain 1.2 million schooling years, this is far beyond China and Brazil who come in second and third, standing to gain 730 and 310 million schooling years respectively.”
“As our report shows, correcting these children’s vision would translate directly into a substantial economic gain both for the individual and for the country as a whole,” said Brad Wong, Chief Economist, Seva Foundation.