Eye Health Is Development: How Orbis Is Aligning Vision Care with India’s SDG Agenda

By Kathleen Sherwin, President & CEO, Orbis International, and, Rishi Raj Borah, Country Director, Orbis International, India

India cannot fully realise its ambitions for health, education, economic participation and inclusion while avoidable vision loss continues to keep millions of its citizens from learning, working and taking part in society. The country carries nearly a fifth of the world's blindness burden, and in 2019 poor eye health cost the Indian economy an estimated Rs 1,158 billion, or 0.57 percent of GDP that year, through reduced employment, elevated mortality risk, education loss for children, productivity loss in employment, welfare loss for the unemployed, and caregiver costs. That cost is expected to rise as the population ages, unless the rate of vision loss falls faster than it currently does. Eye health, then, is not a specialty concern sitting at the edge of the development conversation. It is a precondition for much of what that conversation is trying to achieve, and organisations such as Orbis International offer evidence of what addressing it well can look like.

Strengthening systems, not standalone

India has roughly 15 ophthalmologists per million people, and fewer than half of them are surgically active, leaving pediatric eye care especially thin on the ground. The answer is not another isolated clinic or camp, but capacity built into existing systems: primary, secondary and tertiary care working together, with trained personnel distributed to where shortages are worst. Orbis's Digital Training Hub and Cybersight mentorship platform, alongside dedicated pediatric training centres, extend specialist knowledge to health workers who would otherwise have no access to it. The logic is workforce development woven into public health infrastructure, not parallel to it.

Equity, gender and who gets missed

Women in India experience higher rates of vision impairment and lower access to treatment, a gap shaped by mobility constraints, caregiving responsibilities and limited financial autonomy. Closing it requires knowing who is being missed and why, which is why disaggregated data on gender, age and disability increasingly guides how outreach is designed and targeted. It also requires investment in who delivers care: leadership and mentorship programmes for women optometrists are building a pipeline in a workforce where representation still lags behind demand.

Financing and local ownership

None of this is sustainable if it depends indefinitely on outside funding. Programmes built around co-financing and institutional strengthening, where partner hospitals help fund and eventually run their own services, leave capacity behind rather than dependency. As a founding member of Vision 2020 India, Orbis has worked with partners to help keep eye health integrated into national health policy rather than treating it as a discrete vertical, which is where the real leverage lies: not in how many patients a single programme reaches, but in whether the system it works through can keep reaching them afterwards.

India now has the evidence, the institutions and the policy openings to treat vision as part of its development architecture rather than as a specialty issue confined to eye hospitals. Eye health isn't simply a health outcome. It is an enabler of development, and India has an opportunity to show what happens when vision is integrated into health, education, gender and economic policy.