Guwahati: Actress Zerifa Wahid on Saturday pledged to donate her eyes at Sri Sankaradeva Nethralaya here and also planned to produce a short educational documentary about eye donation with the help of other personalities and Nethralaya as part of her commitment to educate people in this field.
Zerifa's move come within a month of her being appointed brand ambassador for the eye donation campaign by the Nethralaya in Assam.
Pledging to donate her eyes in the presence of Dr Harsha Bhattacharya, Nethralaya managing director and Capt. P.P. Singh, chairman of the Khalsa Centre, Northeast, she called upon people to come forward and donate their eyes "as it not only helps people see this world because of your good gesture, but it also gives a feeling of a part of you being still alive after death".
Bhattacharya, thanking Zerifa for her magnanimous gesture and efforts to educate and encourage others to also donate their eyes, said there was a great demand for cornea in the country but the number of people donating their eyes after death was minimal, thus creating a huge gap between demand and supply.
Singh, who has been encouraging people to donate their eyes for the last eight years, urged the Centre to pass the Human Organ Donation Act so that more organs, including eye, kidney, liver, are available for the needy even from unclaimed bodies.
People working in the eye donation field said more initiatives were needed from doctors, more awareness was needed about cornea donation because it helped people without vision. "We need more Zerifas to take the eye donation movement forward as the scene in Assam is yet to pick up," one of them said.
The Telegraph had last month highlighted cornea donation, quoting statistics released by Eye Bank Association of India (EBAI), that revealed only 158 eye collections in 2017-18 from Assam, compared to 1,865 from Bengal and 1,263 from Odisha during the same period, and a fall from the 2016-17 figure of 214 eye collections.
According to the 2011 censusand data by the department of empowerment of persons with disabilities (divyangjan), Assam has a total of 4,80,065 persons with disabilities of which 80,553 persons are visually impaired.
