Poor vision, as the world's largest unaddressed disability, requires investment to prevent its crippling impact on economic growth.
Prime Minister Modi created waves at this year's World Economic Forum, when he announced that India's economy, already the fifth-largest in the world, would double to $5 trillion by 2025.
Though met with some scepticism, Modi's optimism is not without grounds; with infrastructure spending on the rise and global consumer brands from Unilever to Samsung benefiting from the country's growing middle class.
India's tech sector is offering the most potent promise for the country's economic growth and social development. India is home to one of the world's most active start-up ecosystems, now boasting 10 'unicorns' (companies valued over $1 billion) and attracting over $20 billion in investment over the past three years.
The nation's booming innovation environment is no accident - Modi's government has invested heavily in creating a digital infrastructure that's allowed paperless, cashless services to thrive: allowing digital payments to boom and facilitating the success of flagship biometric ID scheme 'Aadhaar'.
However, India's tech success has also been born out of necessity.
Despite the economic giant's growth, India still faces a range of significant challenges to its ambitious growth projections - from continually low levels of financial inclusion to a systemic shortage of hospital beds and medical staff, a lack of teachers and little growth in university places.
However, I have seen first-hand that those challenges have also created new spaces for technology innovation and creative business models providing the health sector in India to display unrivalled leadership.
Over the last 12 years, my work has focused on an issue that often fails to make the agenda of events like Davos: poor vision.
Poor vision is not a life-threatening condition, and in comparison to global threats like HIV Aids or Malaria, it has historically failed to garner the attention, investment or funding of more pressing health crises.
However, the Vision Impact Institute estimates that there are 2.5 billion people around the world suffering from poor vision, with no means of correcting it - making it the largest unaddressed disability in the world.
Current rates of uncorrected poor vision are a crippling impediment to economic growth, in developing economies from Brazil to Bangladesh.
The Vision Impact Institute estimates that 550 million people in India, or roughly half the population, suffer from poor vision but have no means to correct it. Across the country, India is estimated to lose $37 billion in annual productivity as a result.
But the effects of poor vision are felt far beyond economic losses. A recent report by India's Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways showed that 80 per cent of drivers involved in car accidents had an uncorrected visual impairment. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 200,000 people are killed in road traffic accidents in India a year - the second highest rate in the world.
Perhaps most surprisingly, however, it is estimated that 90 per cent of all cases of poor vision could be solved with a simple pair of glasses - an invention created some 700 years ago.
However, despite the lack of global attention around the issue, India's tech ecosystem is already leading a wave of innovations vital to tackling this global health challenge.
About five years ago, spurred on by a landmark piece of research by
, and embodied by the country's $75-million mission to Mars (the cost of four Bollywood movies, as one commentator put it) India earned a reputation for 'frugal innovation'.
The term referred to below-the-radar inventors - devising low-cost solutions to local problems - borne of a significant necessity.
I came across two such vital innovations two years ago, when we launched The Clearly Vision Prize, a global competition to find the tech start-ups with the innovation and ingenuity to overcome the existing barriers to diagnosis and distribution, that prevent glasses getting to the people who need them.
The first was the Folding Phoropter; created by the Srujana Centre for Innovation at L V Prasad Eye Institute, the Phoropter is a paper device made using simple origami. It takes just a few minutes to construct and can accurately test for refractive errors, like short or long-sightedness - even the most remote locations.
The second was Essmart, a start-up connecting the technologies with the capacity to change lives with the people that need them. Essmart have created a digitally-enabled local market place for vital technologies, by supplying local family-owned retail stores (which account for 90 per cent of India's total retail spending) with the products its customers need most - from reading glasses to solar-powered lanterns.
These two 'frugal' or simple innovations present vital innovations to help overcome the barriers to diagnosis and distribution that well help us tackle this global health crisis.
However, solving this issue on a national, as well as global, scale will require the sort of connected leadership that has facilitated the growth of the nation's tech ecosystem. It will require us to integrate new eye care technologies into Prime Minister Modi's flagship new 'Modicare' services, to encourage fast-growth consumer technology giants like Amazon to include eye testing for their thousands of truck drivers to increase road safety.
In April, Prime Minister Modi will reportedly return to another global leadership forum at this year's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in London. Six of the globe's leading eye health organisations, including Clearly, are calling on leaders to commit to delivering “vision for everyone”.
I hope Prime Minister Modi recognises the vital need to tackle this systemic issue - and the opportunity for India's technology sector to lead once again, and solve a global health crisis.
James Chen is founder of Clearly and author of 'Clearly: How a 700 Year Old Invention Can Change the World Forever'
