'Acute shortage of optometrists in India'

Kolkata, March 10: The tion needs about 1.15 lakh optometrists while it presently has only 9,000 of these professiols, leading to an acute shortage of eye-care specialists, an industry official said on Tuesday. “There are too few professiols in optometry which is uble to meet the tion’s needs”, Bhaskar Bhat, the maging director of Titan, told mediapersons here. He added that about 100 million people use spectacles and another 456 million of the populace are in need of eye correction. “Many people don’t realise they are in need of eye correction. It mostly happens with school-going children who don’t tell their parents about their difficulty in vision. Only after their scores in school starts dwindling do parents realise it”, he said. The company said east India leads the pack of the 9,000-odd registered optometrists, as 60 percent of these professiols come from this region. (IANS)