A team of three doctors from an eye hospital in Mumbai has conducted 46 eye surgeries in three days on the youth who received injuries due to the use of pellet guns by security forces during clashes in Kashmir over the past three weeks.
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India’s leading retina surgeon Dr S Natrajan on Friday described the situation in Kashmir as “disastrous” after performing surgeries on pellet victims at the SMHS Hospital.
The Chief Minister expressed her desire that the eyecare facility at SMHS Hospital be developed as a centre of excellence in ophthalmology-care by making further additions to the existing facilities, said the spokesman.
Another team of doctors is scheduled to arrive in Valley in the next week for the sake of patient care.
“We explained what is happening and within one minute, Dr Natrajan said ‘I’m accompanying you with my team”, said Rishikesh from the Borderless World Foundation. He added that the task is being carried out voluntarily in collaboration with Borderless World Foundation Pune and active support from Department of Ophthalmology, SMHS Hospital.
The court also asked the government to restore mobile phone services in the valley as the ban was affecting the people.
She said her government was committed to provide all the assistance to the patients and whatever specialised treatment was required, would be made available to them, including taking a patient outside the state, if needed. This is for the first time that I saw pellet injuries. 55 others have already been operated upon for visual rehabilitation. The team will be headed by Joint Secretary of the Home Ministry. “Our team has been working on war-footing to ensure that the victims with pellet injuries in their eyes get the best treatment”, Nataranjan told Mirror.
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Disapproving of the use of pellet guns by the security forces against protesters, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court has sought a report from the Centre on handling of the weapon by untrained personnel. “We ourselves are trying to use it in bare minimum so that there are less injuries”, he said adding “But we use them under the extreme situation when crowd control fails by other means”.
