Mirjahan Choudhury receives a free eye test at Rangia Post Office in India. Subhamoy Bhattacharjee for NPR hide title toggle title Subhamoy Bhattacharjee for NPR In recent years, Sangita Kalita has watched her mother and mother-in-law go to the local temple (called naamghar) in the state of Assam, India, and leave disappointed. On each visit,
Mirjahan Choudhury receives a free eye test at Rangia Post Office in India.
Subhamoy Bhattacharjee for NPR
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Subhamoy Bhattacharjee for NPR
In recent years, Sangita Kalita has watched her mother and mother-in-law go to the local temple (called naamghar) in the state of Assam, India, and leave disappointed.
On each visit, their hope was to read sacred Hindu texts, “but due to vision problems, they had a lot of trouble recognizing the lowercase letters in the book,” Kalita explains.
According to the World Health Organization, they are among more than 800 million people all over the world who suffer from presbyopia (age-related near vision loss) for which basic reading glasses would be useful. However, according to the WHO, in many low-income countries, fewer than one in four people who need glasses have them.
Kalita says that for her family, getting reading glasses was simply too complicated and expensive. While in many high-income countries readers are available in all types of stores, in lower-income settings, getting a pair often requires a trip to the hospital or a specialist optician, usually in a big city.
Kalita is trying to change that.
In northeast India, he is part of a team testing a new effort to address the challenge of receiving eye care in remote areas. The idea involves the country’s huge network of post offices.
A quick eye exam in an unusual location
Kalita used to be a school teacher. He now spends his days in a red and white kiosk set against the bright white walls of the post office in the town of Rangiya.
From that point of view, observe how customers enter. Some are there to send packages, while others use a wide variety of services offered at Indian post offices, such as opening and accessing small savings accounts. Kalita notices how they perform their task.
“Many older people come who can’t even fill out the deposit form,” he says.
When he sees them fighting, that’s when he intervenes. He walks over and asks if they want a quick eye exam. If so, he invites them to the kiosk where the words “get a free eye exam and high-quality glasses here” are written at the top. After performing some simple tests on a spiral-bound book, Kalita can tell if they need reading glasses. And if they do, they get a free pair.
Eye screening volunteer Sangita Kalita helps customers at Rangia Post Office.
Subhamoy Bhattacharjee for NPR
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The idea for this model arose from a partnership between WHO and the Universal Postal Union or UPU. “With some 680,000 post offices operating worldwide, postal services offer a unique opportunity to reach remote and underserved areas,” the report explains.
The plan was to take advantage of the world’s largest postal network – India Post has more than 150,000 offices.
“The whole thinking was that we are looking for an established channel, that has reach, that has infrastructure, that has people,” says Shweta Verma, deputy director of programs and operations at VisionSpring India.
Under a pilot program led by VisionSpring, Verma says, between December 2025 and May 2026, more than 5,000 people were tested at five post offices in the state of Assam.
Verma says 80% of those who received glasses were wearing them for the first time. That “tells us that there were no eye health screenings or programs” in the area before the pilot, he says.
Convince the skeptics
Purchasing reading glasses can make a big difference in a person’s income, in addition to making day-to-day tasks easier. This is especially true in the state of Assam, a region known for tea production.
TO study published in The Lancet Global Health found that reading glasses increased the productivity of tea pickers by almost 22%, as they need to see which leaves to pick and are paid based on the quality of their harvest.
Over the course of the post office pilot, Verma says, they had to gain the support of postal workers and postmasters.
Initially, he says, “we got a lot of buy-in from higher-ups,” but postal workers were skeptical, worried about how this new venture would affect their workload. So Verma’s team hired and trained outsiders, like Kalita, to implement the program. “Once the program started,” Verma says, “there was a lot of traction from postmasters as well.”
Babul Boro is the postmaster where Kalita works. Since the pilot began in December 2025, it says more than 1,000 people have come to its post office for eye tests and many have switched to using postal services. He says this boost to his business is enough to give him hope that the pilot will be permanent.
The current pilot is scheduled to conclude in September. So, Ella GudwinCEO of VisionSpring, says they will review all the data and consider funding before deciding whether to continue or even expand. The WHO and UPU have expressed interest in bringing the model to the world.
Beyond vision care
While VisionSpring says this model is a first for glasses, the hope is that this company will demonstrate that post offices can be used “for a wide range of health-related services around the world,” the WHO and UPU report says.
Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, a physician and senior contributing editor at KFF Health News, has written about repurposing post offices to address medical needs. She says France and Japan are good examples of where this is already happening.
In France, for a small fee, postmen can check on older people, he says, “they just come and chat, and check to see: Is there food in the house? Can they move around well?”
Mantu Das takes an eye test at Rangia Post Office.
Subhamoy Bhattacharjee for NPR
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Something similar happens in Japan. And in some parts of the U.S., carriers can search for mail piling up and alert a local agency to initiate a welfare check.
At the Kalita post office in India, she says, one thing motivates her: the smile she sees on people’s faces after she gives them glasses. She says it makes her “feel very fulfilled and happy too.”
He says he is thinking about the teacher who no longer has headaches every day. His mother and mother-in-law who can now read the sacred texts. And the tailor who never knew that reading glasses could be so life-changing and that getting them could be as easy as stopping by the post office.
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