For many years, Sangita Kalita watched her mother and mother-in-law return from their local temple in Assam, India, feeling disappointed. They wanted to read sacred Hindu books, but they could not see the small letters. Like more than 800 million people around the world, they suffered from presbyopia, a common age-related loss of close-up vision. Although basic reading glasses can easily fix this, many people in lower-income countries cannot get them because they are too expensive or only sold in distant city hospitals.
Now, Kalita is helping to change that by working at a small, colorful eye-screening kiosk inside the post office in the town of Rangiya. She watches the customers who come in to mail packages or manage their savings accounts. When she sees older people struggling to fill out deposit forms, she offers them a free eye test. If they need reading glasses, they walk out with a free pair.
This program is a partnership between the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Universal Postal Union. They realized that post offices are perfect for health services because they already have the buildings and workers to reach remote areas. India Post has the largest network in the world, with over 150,000 offices. During a pilot run by the organization VisionSpring between December 2025 and May 2026, workers screened more than 5,000 people in Assam. Remarkably, 80% of those who received glasses had never worn them before.
Getting glasses does not just help people read; it also helps them earn a living. In Assam, a famous tea-producing region, a study found that reading glasses increased the productivity of tea pickers by nearly 22% because they could see which leaves to harvest.
At first, some postal workers were worried about the extra work. To solve this, VisionSpring hired outside helpers like Kalita to run the tests. Local postmasters soon noticed that the eye tests brought more customers into their offices to buy postal services.
The pilot program is scheduled to end in September, when organizers will study the results to decide if they can expand it. They hope this model will show that post offices can be used to deliver other important healthcare services to communities worldwide.