Giving Eye Exams To Homeless Children
Most homeless children in India never get their eyes checked — and the results are devastating
Delhi — It is a predictably wintry morning in the capital city as the van rolls up to the field. Several medical staff members file out as the calls to prayer nearby sound.
“You are here,” a community organizer says with his hands outreached as children run past him. “What can I do to help you get started.”
It doesn’t take long to meet children and see their circumstances: Many of them belong to families too poor to even afford food. The majority of families came to the capital city from nearby villages to find work, only to be disappointment. Several of them met up with scam artists who stole the little money they had.
When Project Prakash learned of the circumstances of these children, we decided to hold an eye care screening camp to provide basic vision care to children who had never had it. Since 2005, Project Prakash has ventured into the interiors of India, identifying, screening and providing vision care to children with low vision and curable blindness. Estimates from the World Health Organization suggest that anywhere from 200,000 to 700,000 such children exist in India.
The homeless population is very much a black box: Little is known about this group, except that they are neglected, severely malnourished and in need of glasses, surgeries or general medical care.
The 2011 Census indicates that 1.77 million people are homeless in India. Even though India ranks as the 124th wealthiest country in the world, more than 90 million make less than $1 USD per day. For many of these families, fathers are the sole income earners and often struggle to find even daily wage work.
Homeless children, especially those under the age of 18, are frequent targets of abuse, including but not limited to forced labor, drug addition and prostitution.
On the day that we visited the camp, we screened nearly 100 children — none of whom had ever visited an optometrist. We provided several children with eye glasses.
“Very few people care about children who are vulnerable, and my sense is that they know it,” Project Prakash executive director Sheila B. Lalwani said. “On that day, we tried to show them otherwise.”
About Project Prakash
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