This month’s focus is on the Optometry Council of India (OCI), as CLS recently had the pleasure to hear from Lakshmi Shinde, CEO.

LAKSHMI SHINDE
CEO

Please tell us about OCI’s history and direction.

We registered as an organization in 2012, so it’s been 10 years, and we’re celebrating the first decade. This was a brainchild of the late Brien Holden, [OD, PhD, DSc]. We started off with the Association of Schools and Colleges of Optometry [ASCO] India, similar to ASCO U.S.—that’s how we started off with all the educational institutions.

We then looked at the Indian Optometry Federation, an association of all the optometric organizations.

In India, we have a two-tier educational system, in a sense. We have a diploma—ophthalmic assistants who are largely into public sector, and then the graduate optometrists, who can do independent practice.

In an effort to get everybody together in the eyecare system, we formed a conglomerate of all the state associations and bits and pieces of the public sector associations so that we can get our numbers together to lobby with the government.

The unicentric body is the Optometry Council of India, a not-for-profit company, which was set up by ASCO [India] and the Indian Optometry Federation.

Presently, we have close to 5,800 optometry members representing more than 75 schools of optometry.

Tell us about any new developments for OCI.

Lobbying the government is an important part of what we do. The second part is raising eyecare awareness. Since we formed, we looked at two events—World Optometry Day in March and World Sight Day in October—to use those to increase eyecare awareness throughout India.

Because we are an all-India organization and we have ASCO as our partner, we started partnering with educational institutions and state associations to increase eyecare awareness. We hold events, screening of school children, and walkathons. We’ve developed small-snippet videos about eye care. Those events are advocacy of eye care to the public. The first was to the government; the second was to the public. That’s how we’ve panned out.

Slowly, we realized that things are moving in the right direction with the government. We said, “Maybe it’s time to get into a bit of practitioner education.” There was a lot of talk put into it because they said, “Why would you do that?” We took opinions from a lot of leaders within India, and they said, “Why don’t we develop something like the American Academy of Optometry, who regularly holds events, and start small, but over time look at research and publications and build practitioner education to such a level?”

We’re slowly getting into practitioner education. We’ve not had face-to-face events yet, but because it is the one-decade celebration, we’re going to have face-to-face events—maybe starting from January onwards.

Tell us about the state of contact lenses in India.

When you look at the market, it’s not that encouraging because the soft contact lens uptick is not great compared to the opportunities that we have in terms of population.

I would say that the scenario might change after the regulation kicks in. The reason being—the way practitioners see it is—I spend 10 minutes with a progressive lens, and I earn 10 times more, because consultation fees are not compulsory in India.

A few optometrists, we think that we need to charge, and that thought process is slowly evolving.

But if you look at optical chains and the big players, they normally don’t charge for contact lens consultations. If you don’t charge contact lens consultation fees, then the profit from contact lenses is hardly any, right? And these are the soft contact lenses.

But if you look at scleral lenses, ortho-k, specialty contact lenses, they are definitely growing in India. It is a huge market as far as India is concerned. CLS