Eye Health Hero: Niroopma Ray

Niroopma is an optometrist by profession. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from the recognised university of India. From the early days of her career, she devoted herself to eliminate avoidable blindness amongst the marginalised community. From the role of optometrist consultant in  Drishti Eye Institute to the recent role of Director at Madhu Eyecare Services, she volunteered and managed different eye care intervention programs, which has brought a positive impact in ones life.

In her recent role as a Director of Madhu Eye Care Services, she designed and executed ” Kids Access Program”, a program which is primarily focussing on developing schools free from refractive error and upscale the learning abilities of children. During the tough time of Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, she had signed a two year contract with Haryana (India) NPCB-VI, to screen 300,000 kids studying at govt. schools, and to distribute 30k glasses in the state of Haryana. These students come from the lower strata of the society, for whom affording a pair of glasses will be difficult, which ultimately results in school drop outs. Our intervention will reduce school dropouts and will help them to learn better.

Since, now schools are getting back to normal with all precautionary measures, under her leadership our target of reaching 300,000 kids is taking up a pace. Till date, we have screened approx 32k students.

We are highly optimistic that her expertise and experience will help us  to achieve our objective of refractive error free schools.

“My role has given me an opportunity to fulfill my childhood desire of serving people. With the increase of digital screens in one’s life, chances of eye related issues increase day by day. Detection and treatment at at a very early stage will help an individual to manage.

A section of the society is still unaware on importance of eye health in his or her daily life. Sometimes it’s economic barriers or social barriers which make a person ignore issues, which becomes huge issues over the passage of time. My work has let me reach such people and to educate them on use of eyeglasses.”

– Niroopma Ray