When Titan Eye+ introduced “The Eye Test Menu” on World Sight Day, they did something deceptively uncomplicated: they made the walls of highway dhabas into clinics, and they turned the lunch break of a truck driver into an opportunity for diagnosis. The idea reads like a case study in empathy design – an eye chart served as a menu, the invitation was something that a truck driver is used to, and an optometrist was already waiting where the drivers usually stopped. In India, the mixed burdens of long hours, irregular hours, and economic precarity mean that many professional drivers (truckers, rickshaw and cab drivers, delivery partners) deprioritise even basic health checks. Titan Eye+ was there waiting to meet them, placing the sight-testing in their line of view, and paired the on-the-fly screening with follow through; free eye tests, corrective spectacles that were prescribed, a choice of frames, and the option to make it all convenient for the driver by providing shipping back to their home at a subsidised rate to encourage ongoing use rather than losing the glasses roadside. The campaign was more than just a stunt; it outlined a deliberate CSR playbook which translated screening into ongoing correction and adherence.
The Crisis Behind the Wheel
The need for interventions like this is clear. In 2022, India documented 4,61,312 road accidents that resulted in 1,68,491 deaths and left 4,43,366 individuals injured – numbers that are not abstractions, but the aggregate of missed brakes, blurred lines and split second decisions on highways and streets. Vision loss among drivers is a large and often invisible component of this fatality and injury rate.
Source: Titan Eyeplus. ‘The Eye Test Menu released on The World Sight Day’
Vision problems are prominent, but often-unaddressed contributors to that traffic toll. A number of field studies and outreach reports have all noted a high burden of uncorrected refractive error among professional drivers: a study called ICARE that screened well over tens of thousands of truck drivers found that roughly half had some degree of compromised vision. This has been echoed in more recent studies and screening efforts, with pilots showing over 55% of truck drivers were found to have some degree of compromised vision, which is often remedied by distance or near correction. These are not marginal errors; they illustrate a systemic gap between licensing procedures, occupational risk, and the lived experience of people in high risk occupations who drive long night shifts and inter-state (Press Information Bureau).
India’s truck drivers keep the nation moving, but often drive blind to their own vision.
When CSR Meets Creativity
The Eye Test Menu stands out in the CSR space because it utilizes a multi-layered approach that incorporates awareness, access, and finally accountability. Awareness was achieved through a lens of creativity – the menu – to bypass issues of stigma and apathy awareness. Access was created through mobile camps at dhabas or other drivers’, hot spots, and through working with platforms, such as local ride aggregators, to expand reach to rickshaw and cab drivers and last-mile delivery workers. Finally, accountability was built into the logistics of the program, such as having prescribed glasses on the spot available or placed an order for glasses and/or have them delivered to the driver’s home, which reflect the sometimes hidden barriers that keep one-time screening from translating into treatment. At a practical level, Titan Eye+ has reported screening more than 7,000 drivers from over 900 locations since June 2024, providing an early signal that the model can be scaled in places where drivers are already gathering. The campaign film and activation, done creatively by Ogilvy, helped build upon this narrative – not as charity, but good common sense for public safety.
When Titan Eye+ swapped food menus for eye test charts, roadside dhabas became vision clinics in disguise. A creative twist that served clarity instead of curry, bringing sight back on the menu for India’s drivers.
Seeing the Invisible: The Lives Behind the Wheels
The Eye Test Menu also tackles some of the most ignored topics within the road-safety conversation. Policy discussions tend to be about engineering fixes – better signage, safer road design, stricter vehicle standards – important pieces no doubt, but they don’t typically engage with the occupational health reality. Truck drivers in India are usually away from regular healthcare and operating on irregular sleep, dehydrated/fatigued, and lack pathways for basic preventive care. And poorly vision only compounds all of this: diminished visual acuity and undiagnosed colour-vision deficits delay hazard detection, challenge lane keeping, and contribute to driving safely at night. Titan Eye+ takes the unconventional approach of focusing on an occupational cohort that literally moves goods throughout supply chains, and so successfully reframes road safety as a workforce health issue – which, in fact, benefits the entire public, from other commuters to the communities that depend on the goods and services which these drivers transport. Reports from public health and vision NGOs have asserted the need for integrated, context-sensitive eye care outreach to high-risk occupational groups for a good while; it is exactly that idea operationalized (Sightsavers).
Dignity, Design, and Delivery
Just as importantly, dignity is woven into the intervention. Rather than a top-down inspection, the menu approach aligns to the routines and choices of the drivers. Drivers are not herded into clinics; they purchase food and opt in. They choose their frames; they received sun and night driving spectacles at their homes – a subtle reframing from paternalistic outreach to consumer-friendly health service. From the CSR standpoint, this is interesting, as it puts a brand capability together (retail footprint, optical expertise, supply chain) and social impact incentives (safer roads, protected livelihoods) in a measurable, human-centered way. In addition, it gives them opportunities for follow up: frame replacements, seasonal checks and education on night driving eyewear and glare protection (particularly pertinent for drivers who work nights) (titaneyeplus.com).
A Roadmap for Replication
Certainly, one initiative cannot address a systemic issue. Road safety requires coordinated policies, licensing reforms including routine vision screening, enforcement, and broader public health provisioning for at-risk worker populations. However, public-private experiments like the Eye Test Menu provide a replicable model – low cost, high touch, and grounded in behavior change – that temporarily fills the policy void, while longer-term reforms are debated. They also provide a principled corporate posture that looks beyond logo displays to something practical and tangible: screenings completed, glasses dispensed, and ultimately fewer preventable vision-loss incidents on the road. Evidence from pilot projects and NGO reports point to safety dividends from meeting drivers’ visual needs; the next step will be scaling this and embedding these wins into licensing and occupational health frameworks (Ministry of Road Transport and Highways).
A Pathway to Clarity
Ultimately, “The Eye Test Menu” matters because it understands what many effective CSR initiatives fail to: that lives can be saved through small gestures that respect cultural fluency (reducing friction) and thus livelihoods. Titan Eye+ did more than stage an imaginative activation; it engineered a human-centred pathway from detection to correction, and shepherded an overlooked workforce toward safer roads. If the campaign prompts other brands and policymakers to treat occupational vision as essential infrastructure, then a simple menu on a dhaba wall will have done what all the best CSR aims to do – change systems in ways that are practical, scalable and profoundly humane.
Clear Cut Health Desk
New Delhi, UPDATED: Nov 07, 2025 12:20 IST
Written By: Antara Mrinal
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