Prevalence of refractive errors among school children in western rajasthan

Child vision is essential for successful learning. This paper is focused on 1000 young school children, aged 8 – 16 years (class 4th – 10th). Convenient random sampling was adopted to select the schools in Jodhpur district in Rajasthan. Vision screening was done by a questionnaire comprised of two blocks, wherein block 1 belongs to identification that is name, age, class and sex of child. Block 2 comprised of relevant history and eye examination which included determination of visual acuity and retinoscopy. Result of this study shows that 10.2% of the students were found to have refractive errors. The distribution of refractive errors names: Myopia, Hypermetropia and Astigmatism were 56.9%, 13.7% and 29.4% respectively. This study also indicates that the percentage of ammetropic students increases accordingly as the level of education increases. The data’s of present study concluded that visual impairment due to refractive errors in school children is large enough to be a public health problem.