- Netranjali, an RPG Foundation initiative, has screened around 3 lakh people through 2,500+ eye camps across 50+ cities and towns.
- The programme provides free eye screenings and 1.5 lakh pairs of spectacles, especially for rural communities, school children, slum residents and truckers.
The queue outside a Netranjali eye camp at a truck stop in Maharashtra begins to form before the team sets up equipment. The men standing in it are long-distance truckers spending 12-hour days staring at roads. They often deal with uncorrected vision problems; they have neither the time nor the money to fix them at an ophthalmologist’s clinic. This is one of the less discussed corners of RPG Foundation’s Netranjali programme, launched by Harsh Goenka’s RPG Group in 2014-15. The mobile eye-care initiative has quietly screened approximately 3 lakh people across 2,500+ camps in over 50 cities and towns. It distributed 1.5 lakh pairs of free spectacles to people in need.
Starting with a Shocking Statistic
India is home to roughly 12 million blind people, according to WHO estimates, with the number growing by approximately 30,000 every year. A significant proportion of that blindness is from conditions that are treatable or preventable if caught early — cataracts, refractive errors, and glaucoma. In rural communities and informal urban settlements, the barrier is rarely the existence of treatment; it is awareness, distance, and cost. Netranjali was designed around that specific gap: bringing examination-quality eye care to camps in locations where populations never voluntarily visit an ophthalmology clinic. The camps are free. The spectacles are free. Referrals for further treatment are coordinated with the local health infrastructure.
Who the Camps Actually Reach
The geographic footprint of Netranjali includes Mumbai, Kolhapur, Nashik, Pune in Maharashtra; Ahmedabad, Halol, Rajkot, Surat, Koteshwar, Bhuj in Gujarat; Bhubaneswar in Odisha; Bengaluru, Mysore, Chennai, Hubli in Karnataka; Jalandhar in Punjab; Delhi; Faridabad in Haryana; Kanpur and Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. Each camp screens 70 to 130 people. Specifically, targeted groups include rural farming populations, slum communities, school children with undiagnosed vision problems, and the trucking communities Goenka has highlighted as a high-need group that typically falls outside the reach of urban healthcare infrastructure entirely. Goenka has announced plans to expand camps into Northeast India, Jammu and Kashmir, and Himachal Pradesh.
The Story of Reshma’s Daughter
One outcome the programme itself has described sits behind the aggregate numbers. Reshma Bharade, an Anganwadi Sevika in a village near Vasai, came to a Netranjali camp with her six-year-old daughter, who had been struggling to read the classroom blackboard. Reshma’s older child was blind. She was terrified her daughter would follow. The camp screened the child, provided spectacles, and referred Reshma’s other cases to further treatment. ‘Now she can see the blackboard,’ Reshma said. It is one child’s story, but it is the story the programme was designed to produce at scale: early identification that changes a child’s educational trajectory before uncorrected vision quietly derails it.
Wider RPG Foundation Work
The RPG Foundation also funds primary education initiatives, women’s empowerment programmes, environmental conservation, and cultural preservation work across India. The foundation sits alongside the RPG Art Foundation, which Goenka established in 2013 to fund art education and exhibitions and to support emerging artists. The dual-track provides social infrastructure through the main foundation and cultural investment through the art foundation. It reflects a view of philanthropic responsibility that does not treat human dignity and cultural life as separate concerns.
The Way Forward
Three lakh eye screenings are a large number. One-and-a-half lakh free pairs of spectacles is a larger number. But the most important metric in Netranjali’s record is the one that does not appear in any single camp report: how many children are sitting at the front of classrooms they used to sit at the back of, not because of bad behaviour but because they could not see the board. India’s school health programmes mandate vision screening for children, but implementation is patchy, and coverage in rural schools is inconsistent at best. A programme like Netranjali demonstrates that mobile, community-embedded, free-at-point-of-care eye screening is operationally feasible at scale. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare should treat the RPG Foundation’s decade of operational data as a blueprint for a national school vision screening mandate with real enforcement teeth.
Clear Cut Health Desk
New Delhi, UPDATED: September 13, 2026 18:00 IST
Written By: Tanmay J. Urs
