A special thought for the sightless

It has to be noted though, that the people blessed with eye-sight but deeply concerned over the plight of the blind have raised the right to sight slogan for their sightless fellow-beings. But given the high incidence of blindness, partial and complete, across the globe and, in a poor developing country like Bangladesh, the time is ripe for the sightless themselves, especially the partially blind and the curable ones, to be demanding vision as a matter of right. A total of 37 million people are blind the world over, even though 75 percent of this blindness was curable and preventable. In Bangladesh, 1,50,000 people go blind every year, with some six million suffering from low vision, as it is. Eighty-five percent of the blindness results from cataracts which were removable through surgical intervention.

Blindness among children, in particular, is preventable. Corneal scarring is treatable, so can cataracts be gotten rid of, early in the day. But most of all, making up for vitamin 'A' deficiency can do wonders in keeping child or adolescent blindness at bay. Actually, awareness building programmes to sensitise people about sightlessness and community-based preventive measures must go hand in hand so as to markedly reduce the incidence of blindness. Let's not forget, the incidence in Bangladesh surpasses the regional average.

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The hard fact is we have a sizable blind population on our hands. One of the major things they are in dire need of, to get by on a daily basis, is the currency notes which are unfortunately user-unfriendly as far as they go. They cannot tell the differences between legal tenders of different denominations -- Taka ten, fifty, hundred or five hundred notes -- by the mere sensation of touching them.

What the government needs to do, therefore, is to etch distinguishing marks on the notes in Braille such as on the US dollar bills exclusively minted for their blind population so that they can carry out financial transactions conveniently and efficiently -- with some jest in life to top it off.