Project Prakash
“Prakash in Sanskrit means ‘light’. The goal of Project Prakash is to bring light into the lives of curably blind children and, in so doing, illuminate some of the most fundamental scientific questions about how the brain develops and learns to see.
Project Prakash was launched in 2003 by Prof. Pawan Sinha. Since that time, Prof. Sinha and his graduate students, Yuri Ostrovsky, Ethan Meyers and Aaron Andalman, have worked with ophthalmologists at the major eye-hospitals in India and have conducted several studies with individuals who gained sight late in life.
The base for Project Prakash in India has been set up at the Shroff Charity Eye Hospital (SCEH) in New Delhi. Collaborating investigators at SCEH are: Dr. Suma Ganesh MS, Dr. Umang Mathur MS, Ms. Sachu Rajasekharan and Ms. Iyerish.
Founded over 75 years ago, SCEH provides world-class eye care. It has treated over 4.4 million patients and performed over 250,000 eye surgeries. A significant proportion of SCEH’s patients come from the economically weak sections of society where the prevalence of childhood blindness is especially high. Over the past few years, the hospital has maintained an active outreach programme that brings in thousands of patients from villages in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan for sight restoring surgery.
India is home to nearly 30% of the entire blind population of the world. Many of India’s blind are children with congenital anomalies of the eye. In over 50% of these cases, the blindness is treatable or preventable. However, most children never receive medical attention. The challenges of poverty, compounded by the visual handicap, exact a grim toll. Orbis International estimates that 60% of India’s blind children die before reaching adulthood.
Project Prakash seeks to address this need. In conjunction with collaborating hospitals, the Project has launched outreach initiatives that screen children in villages and identify those whose blindness can be treated. To date, over 700 children have been screened and treatment provided to several of them. The transportation, treatment, hospital stay and follow-up examinations are entirely free of charge for the children.
The experimental data they have gathered so far has already begun challenging some long held conceptions regarding brain plasticity and time-lines of learning. They are finding that the human brain retains an ability to acquire complex visual tasks even after several years of congenital blindness. The patterns of errors that the children make in their controlled experiments allow them to infer the nature of object representations.
They are complementing these studies with brain imaging to assess topographical changes in cortical organisation as a function of time past surgery and their correlations with the behaviorally observed skill acquisition. These efforts have begun yielding data that constrain and guide theoretical models of visual learning and recognition.”
