Organization background
Bhoomika is a non-governmental charitable organization (NGO) that has been working in Orissa since 1997. The focus of the organization is (i) motivate and provide opportunities to enterprising poor via micro-finance loans (ii) provide vision health-care services through its eye hospital, (iii) to provide relief, food and shelter to impoverished villagers during times of calamity such as cyclones, (iv) harness the power of group dynamics by organizing the poor into self-help groups and farmers-clubs, and (v) providing them with training and empower them with a sustainble livelihood.

Project background
Many states in India have very poor healthcare facilities (especially in the rural areas), which lead to a significant impairment in the quality of life of poor people. One particularly devastating impairment is loss of vision. This is all the more tragic because in several cases, loss of vision can be remedied. The quality of healthcare facilities also varies by region of India, with the east coast state of Orissa being one of the most backward in this regard. To illustrate, the CSR-Cataract Surgical Rate is 8000 (cataract surgeries done per million population) in south India, but only 2000 in Orissa. To address this lack of eyecare services, Bhoomika has been running 3 eye hospitals near Bhubaneswar that provides eye care services via a two fold approache of (i) center based out-patient department (OPD) and (ii) Camp based OPD services, (where the hospital reaches out to rural poor who cannot access the facility through diagnostic eye check-up camps every year). However, there is still a significant gap in their services, particularly in the area of paediatric eye care. This is because paediatric eye care requires specific expertise, equipment and training to manage the patients. The hospital receives approximately 2,000 paediatric patients annually in its out-patient department, but due to limited infrastructure and capacity all paediatric surgical cases are referred to tertiary eye hospitals located in urban cities and in neighbouring states which are not really affordable by poor patients. It has been estimated that within a sixty-kilometer radius, there are 457097 children in the age group of 0-15 years and of those, 114275 children suffer from refractive errors, and 1100 children suffer from low vision.

Project description
This project will address the problem of refractive error, cataract, low vision, and other ocular disorders in paediatric population of central Orissa. The intervention will take the form of performing school-screening programs, conducting outreach-camps, conducting training programs (for school teachers, health workers and anganwadi workers), community-screening programs, and educating the society about childhood blindness. Further, the hospital will use donor funds to defray the expense of paediatric eye surgeries, and to strengthen its infrastructure by procuring essential equipment, and training its eye care personnel and anesthetist's to treat and large numbers of paediatric patients.
GKF will pick up the cost of buying and outfitting a van as a mobile eyecare facility, to be used in the outreach programs.

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