Vision in India

KHAN Bahadur Dr Tasadduq Hussain has contributed a very interesting and instructive article on “Vision in India” to the columns of The Antiseptic. It is undeniable that the eyesight of educated Indians is gradually deteriorating, a fact which has not attracted as much attention as it should have on the part of those who are in charge of the education of our boys and girls. A large percentage of the students of Indian colleges and secondary schools have defective vision, which is not so much the result of heredity as of the surroundings in which they are brought up and the manner in which they receive their education. The facts and figures cited by Dr Hussain clearly indicate the alarming magnitude of the deterioration of vision in India. According to the Census of 1921, there are 72,708 young men (below the age of 20) completely blind in both eyes in India. The total number of blind men in the United Provinces alone is 105,072. The number of blind persons in India was 443,653 in 1911, which rose to 479,637 in 1921. The writer proceeds to point out that myopia is getting far more prevalent. This is due to children doing much finer work at an earlier age. The writer examined 3,000 schoolboys, of whom only 40 were wearing glasses. Of the remaining 2,960, only 1,063 had standard vision, while 599 had abnormal vision and 1,298 had seriously defective vision without glasses. There are about 9,000,000 scholars in India; and if the 3,000 cases examined by the writer were at all typical, the conclusion to which one is driven is that as many as 5,810,400 scholars in the country have more or less defective sight.