In recent years, Sangita Kalita has watched as her mother and mother-in-law go to the local temple — called a naamghar — in Assam State, India and leave disappointed.
Each visit, their hope was to read the sacred Hindu texts, "but due to vision issues, they faced a lot of problems recognizing the small letters in the book," explains Kalita.
According to the World Health Organization, they are among more than 800 million people worldwide who suffer from presbyopia — age-related loss of close-up vision — for which basic reading glasses would help. Yet, according to WHO, in many lower-income countries, fewer than one in four people who need eyeglasses have them.
Kalita says for her family, getting reading glasses was simply too complicated and expensive. While in many high-income countries, readers are available in all kinds of stores, in lower-resourced settings, getting a pair often requires a trip to the hospital or a specialized optical shop, usually in a big city.
Kalita is trying to change that.
In northeastern India, she's part of a team testing a new effort to address the challenge of getting vision care in remote areas. The idea involves the country's massive network of post offices.
A quick eye test in an unusual place
Kalita used to be a school teacher. Now, she spends her days at a red and white kiosk that's against the bright white walls of the post office in the town of Rangiya.
From that vantage point, she watches as customers come in. Some are there to mail packages while others use a wide variety of services offered in Indian post offices, such as opening and accessing small savings accounts. Kalita notices how they go about their task.
"A lot of old people come in who are not even able to fill out the deposit form," she says.
When she sees them struggling, that's when she steps in. She approaches, asking if they'd like a quick eye test. If so, she invites them to the kiosk where the words "get a free eye-screening and high-quality eye glasses here" are written at the top. After they work through a few simple tests in a spiral bound book, Kalita can tell if they need reading glasses. And if they do, they walk out with a free pair.
The idea for this model came from a partnership between WHO and the Universal Postal Union or UPU. "With an estimated 680,000 post offices operating globally, postal services offer a unique opportunity to reach remote and underserved areas," the report explains.
The plan was to tap into the world's largest postal network — India Post has over 150,000 offices.
"The whole thinking was that we look at an established channel, which has a reach, which has infrastructure, which has people," says Shweta Verma, deputy director for programs and operations at VisionSpring India.
Under a pilot program run by VisionSpring, Verma says, between December 2025 and May 2026, more than 5,000 people were screened in five post offices in Assam State.
Verma says 80% of those who received glasses were first time wearers. That "tells us that there was no screening or program for eye health" in the area prior to the pilot, she says.
Convincing skeptics
Getting reading glasses can make a big difference for a person's income, in addition to making every day tasks easier. That's especially true in Assam State, a region known for tea production.
A study published in The Lancet Global Health found that reading glasses increased tea pickers' productivity by almost 22% since 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've had to earn the support of postal workers and postmasters.
Initially, she says, "we got a lot of buy-in from the higher-ups," but postal workers were skeptical, worrying how this new undertaking would impact workload. So Verma's team hired and trained outside individuals — like Kalita — to implement the program. "Once the program started," Verma says, "there was a lot of traction also from postmasters."
Babul Boro is the postmaster where Kalita works. Since the pilot started in December 2025, he says over 1,000 people have come into his post office for eye tests and many have gone on to use postal services. He says this boost to his business is enough to make him hope that the pilot becomes permanent.
The current pilot is slated to wrap up in September. Then, Ella Gudwin, CEO of VisionSpring, says they'll look through all the data and consider the funding before deciding whether to continue — or even expand. WHO and UPU have expressed interest in taking the model worldwide.
Beyond vision care
While VisionSpring says this model is a first for eyeglasses, the hope is that this undertaking demonstrates that post offices can be used "for a wide range of health-related services worldwide," says the WHO and UPU report.
Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, a physician and a senior contributing editor at KFF Health News, has written about repurposing post offices to address medical needs. She says France and Japan are strong examples of where this is already happening.
In France, for a small fee, letter carriers can check on elderly individuals, she says, "just stopping in and having a chat, and kind of checking to see: Is there food in the house? Are they able to get around okay?"
In Japan there's something similar. And in some parts of the U.S., carriers can look for mail piling up and alert a local agency to initiate a welfare check.
In Kalita's post office in India, she says, one thing motivates her: The smile she sees on people's faces after she gives them eye glasses. She says it makes her "feel very accomplished and happy too."
She says she's thinking of the teacher who no longer gets headaches each day. Her 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 swinging by the post office.
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