Sometimes the answer is spectacles, not books

The health camps started by accident, in a classroom in Khammam district, when a volunteer noticed that a girl who could not read the board could read the same passage held twelve inches from her face. We screened that school and found 23 children out of 148 with uncorrected refractive error — roughly one in six. When we ran the screening properly across eleven schools the following year, with an optometrist rather than a medical student, the figure came out at 14%. Almost none of these children had ever had an eye test. Their families had not been careless; there is no reason a farm labouring household would think to test a nine-year-old's eyes, and the school has no protocol for it. The child is simply recorded as weak in studies, and after a few years she believes it too. A screening costs us about ₹40 per child at camp volumes. A pair of spectacles, frame included, costs ₹340. For that money we routinely move a child from "cannot read words" to "reads a Class-2 paragraph" inside one term, which no book in our catalogue can do on its own. Six thousand three hundred children screened since 2018. Six hundred and twelve pairs of spectacles. And a standing instruction to every volunteer running a reading assessment: before you record that a child cannot read, hold the card twelve inches from her face and ask her to try again.