From Our Special Correspondent
Daijiworld Media Network - Bangalore
Bangalore, Jun 21: Project Vision has embarked on an ambitious campaign to appoint Vision Ambassadors with the specific mission of making India’s IT capital as the new Eye Donation Capital of the country.
Each of the Vision Ambassadors have taken upon themselves the task of getting 100 people to pledge their eyes.
Project Vision needs 100,000 Vision Ambassadors to cover the whole population of Bangalore and thus make Bangalore the eye donation capital of India.
The movement of Project Vision was started in Bangalore last year under the leadership of Fr George Kannanthanam. About 50 persons from different walks of life have come together to promote this movement.
Project Vision is taking this movement to different religious, social and corporate groups. Archbishop of Bangalore Most Rev Dr Bernard Moras along with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar of the Art of Living are the patrons of this movement.
All the students of the three St Joseph's Colleges - Evening, Arts and Science and Commerce- were given an awareness program on eye donation by Project Vision since last Friday.
More than 6000 students were part of the program out of which most of them have pledged their eyes.
Many of the young people have promised to promote the cause as Vision Ambassadors. Next Monday 600 post graduate students of the St Joseph’s college will go through this program.
With about 1500 persons having already signed up to be the Vision Ambassadors, Project Vision has taken up a special orientation program for such Vision Ambassadors at the St Thomas Church Diary Circle 8.
More than 5000 persons have already pledged their eyes with Project Vision.
They will be given the technical details of eye donation. They will also be given a Volunteer kit with all the information and materials required for them to promote the eye donation on their own with their family, apartment, company or any group they belong to.
Thus Project Vision wants to make eye donation into a movement involving all the groups in the society.
There are 39 million blind persons in the world, out of which 15 million are in India. Out of the 420,000 people who died in Karnataka in 2013, only 3500 people donated their eyes.
About 20 % of all the bind people can get back their sight if corneas are available for transplant.
The vision of Project Vision is 'let everyone see.’
World Health Organisation has encouraged all the nations and organisations to promote eye donations and remove all needless blindness through its program 'Vision 2020. Project Vision wants to make this possible.