The 24-hour eye bank helpline proves to be defunct.
Though a lot is being done by several government and voluntary agencies to promote eye donation, official callousness and inefficiency play spoilsport making the entire process a major joke.
The 24-hour exclusive help line — 1919 — provided by BSNL and MTNL all over the country to facilitate easy access to the nearest eye bank is not working. “This line was provided in 1993 as a non-metered service to make donation and harvesting of eyes simple,” Dr Ashley Thomas Mulamoottil, an ophthalmologist, told DNA.
The order issued by the director general of the telecommunications department on August 6, 1993 has been prominently displayed by the Eye Bank Association of India on its website (www.ebai.org).
However, Dr Ashley said, the service 1919 has not been functioning for years. “The department of telecommunications has not responded to the hundreds of pleas,” said Dr Ashley who leads a team of eye donation activists across India. The purpose of 1919 was to alert the nearest eye bank about death in a locality. “All one has to do is to call up the number and tell the name and address of the deceased person. The call will be received by the nearest eye bank. A medical team would rush to the locality to harvest the eyes of the deceased person so that his/her eyes will live through another person,” Dr Ashley explained.
A query with the Department of Telecommunications under the Right to Information Act threw an interesting piece of information. “As per records available, 1919 is not a toll free number for information service on eye bank,” says Rajiv Kumar, director of DOT, in his reply dated March 15, 2011 to the RTI query.
An email to Kapil Sibal, union communications minister about the non-functioning of the toll free number, sent on March 14, 2011 by an eye donation campaigner has not evoked any response from the minister or bureaucrats.
Dr Usha Gopinathan, president, EBAI, expressed her helplessness over the whole issue. “I am not sure whether this is location specific or an all India issue,” she told DNA.
Lathika S Nair, a Bangalore housewife and Anup, a Chennai-based mediaperson said efforts to reach 1919 proved futile. Dr Hemanth Kumar, Lucknow-based chairperson of the EBAI central zone, too, agreed that 1919 has become defunct. “It could be due to the mushrooming telephone exchanges all over the country as part of the great telecom revolution,” he said.
In an effort to rejuvenate the eye donation and harvesting campaigns, Dr Ashley and his team of campaigners recently produced a video featuring Rajashree Warrier, a Bharatanatyam exponent, highlighting the significance of eye.
“Our awareness programmes could become effective only if we have the infrastructure. We have to harvest and transplant the eyes within six hours of the death of the donor. If we do not have a facility to speed up the process, all these campaigns will prove to be useless,” said Dr Ashley.
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