Kannoli

India is home to over 20% of the World's blind population. What makes the matter rather tragic is that 80% of the blindness is completely curable and yet over 30 million people continue to live with visual impairments. A blind person who is avoidably blind becomes a needless burden to himself as well as the family and in an Indian rural household, a blind elder may either inhibit an earning member from staying at home in a care giving role or cause a school going girl child to stay at home as a care giver. The last course of action will have inter generational impact. The reasons for not seeking cure are awareness, access and affordability. Affordable (read free), qualitative eye care is generally unavailable in the rural areas which results in people remaining blind rather than seeking a cure

Project Kannoli is executed by Sankara Eye Hospital through a rural outreach programme which carries out eye screening camps in rural villages of Kanchipuram, Tiruvallur and Chengalpattu Districts of Tamilnadu and Ganjam and Gajapati Districts of Odisha covering a population of over 15 million. Persons identified with need for surgical intervention are brought to the Hospital at Pammal and treated. The entire intervention is free of cost to the patient thus ensuring that the constraints of access and affordability are entirely addressed. The cost of each such free surgery comes to around Rs 4200. On an average the Hospital carries out 12,000 to 15,000 free surgeries every year across Chennai and Samarjhola, Odisha.

Our firm conviction is that no one should remain blind needlessly. If the only reasons to remain with severe visual impairments are access and affordability, our intervention will help address both. We have contributed to the restoration of vision to over 300,000 people in the past 25 years of our operations and we intend continuing to provide qualitative compassionate eye care to the needy