Dangoria Charitable Trust

Purpose:India has the largest population of youth in the world, thereby making them important contributors to the “India of Tomorrow”. Over 80% of knowledge gained is by the visual sense, thereby making school screening programs a necessity in our country. Data from the pre-COVID era, that is, 2017–18 was collected from close to 19,000 children in Gurugram, Haryana, a tier two city in National Capital Region, India. A similar prospective observational study is planned post COVID-19 (2022–23) for further analysis to depict the impact of COVID-19 in these areas.Methods:The program They See, They Learn was set at government schools in the area of operations (district of Gurgaon, Haryana), where the children and their families were unable to afford eye care services. All children who were screened underwent a comprehensive eye examination at the school premises itself.Results:A total of 18,939 students were screened over a period of 18 months, covering a total of 39 schools in the Gurugram belt, in the first phase of the program. Eleven point eight percent (n = 2254) of all school students had some form of refractive error. Girl students were found to have a higher refractive error rate (13.3%) compared to boy students (10.1%) across the schools screened. Myopia was the most common type of refractive error.Conclusion:School students require perfect vision or else they can be discouraged and may become a major burden to the economy of any developing nation. A school screening program aiming at populations that cannot afford such basic needs like spectacles is a must in all zones of the country.

The study addresses the issue of micronutrient deficiency in diets through health and nutrition education and introduction of homestead gardens and backyard poultry with high egg-yielding birds in a rural community. The target was the pregnant women and mothers with preschool children aged 6–24 months registered with the 11 Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) centres called ‘Anganwadi’ in eight villages of Medak district, in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (now Telangana). Knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) surveys of health and nutrition on a sub-sample of 142 mothers with 6- to 24-month-old children done initially and at the end of three years showed marked improvement in mothers’ knowledge and child-feeding practices. At the end of three years, 335 target families had raised vegetable gardens diverting 57.8 acres of land. The KAP survey responses showed that the percentage of families raising homestead gardens increased from 30 % initially to over 70 % finally. Weekly mean frequency of green leafy vegetables (GLV) cooked, increased from 1.9 to 2.4. The percentage of households cooking GLV more than three times per week increased from 21 in the initial survey to 45 in the final survey. Weekly frequency and quantity of eggs consumed, among households who set up BYP, more than doubled. ICDS records showed gradual decline in percentage of 6 to 24-month-old children suffering from moderate-to-severe malnutrition, over the three-year experimental period.