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New Delhi, March 26 (PTI): India's government is poised to change its four-decade-old definition of blindness to bring it in line with the World Health Organisation's less stringent criterion and lower the country's blindness stats.

Health officials said the current Indian criterion, which labels a person unable to count fingers from a distance of six metres as blind, results in higher estimates than the WHO stipulation of a distance of three metres.

"With the current definition, we project higher figures of blindness in India in international fora. India gets presented in a poor light compared to other countries," said Promila Gupta, deputy director-general of the National Programme for Control of Blindness, which set the current Indian criterion.

Gupta said the data India currently generates cannot be compared with global estimates as other countries follow the WHO criterion. Uniformity of blindness criteria is a pre-requisite for a reliable estimate of the global burden of blindness, she said.

The proposal to change India's criterion is partly driven by the country's goal of reducing the prevalence of blindness to 0.3 per cent of the population by 2020, in line with the WHO's Vision 2020 goals.

"It will be extremely difficult to achieve the WHO goal using the current (Indian) definition. By adopting the blindness criterion of the WHO, India can achieve the goal," said Praveen Vashist, a senior ophthalmologist at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.

The health ministry plans also to rename the National Programme for Control of Blindness as the National Programme for Control of Visual Impairment and Blindness.

"The idea is to strengthen the programme by focusing not only on blind people but also on those with some (less severe) kind of visual impairment," Gupta said.

Read this article:
Blindness yardstick - Calcutta Telegraph

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