Despite Central Government’s emphasis on improving eye-donations across the country—Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, some States of North-East and Island States— have had zero cornea collection in 2021-22 so far as per data procured through RTI. The data from 2016 onwards points to the fact that these States have also been consistently performing poorly. Topping the list for cornea collection is Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. As per National Blindness Survey (2015-2019), there are about 4.8 million people suffering from blindness and corneal blindness is the second most common type of blindness. Corneal blindness is 7.4% of total blindness in India.
The Health Ministry in its response to social activist Chandra Shekhar Gaur said that there continued to be States and Union Territories (UT) in India which had zero number of functional eye banks as on July 2021. While States/UT having a robust cornea donation and transplant system had a better network of eye banks., Uttar Pradesh (41), Karnataka (32), Gujarat (25), Andhra Pradesh (19) and Tamil Nadu (20) were examples of the same.
Cornea transplant stayed between 30,740 in (2016-17) to 24,783 (2021-22) while falling to a low of 11,859 during the COVID pandemic.
