Kannoli-Vision Saver

Out of an estimated 285 million people with visual impairments in the world, about 45 million are blind in India. The leading cause of blindness is due to cataract, which is easily curable. Vision loss due to cataract is one disability which lends itself to being addressed in mere minutes of surgery by an ophthalmic surgeon and with almost negligible adverse effects and sight restoration brings with it numerous social and economic advantages. The reasons why a large segment of rural India continues to live with blindness are lack of access to qualitative eye care coupled with affordability of the costs involved.

Sankara Eye Hospital, Pammal, Chennai India is a community eye care provider for rural villagers in Kanchipuram, Thiruvallur & Chittoor districts of Tamil Nadu and Ganjam, Gajapathi & Khandamal districts of Odisha. The Hospital is a state-of-the-art Eye care facility that has been providing qualitative eye care to all irrespective of socio-economic, religious, linguistic and geographical backgrounds. We conduct outreach camps in the above said districts, where the patients are screened and those identified as in need of surgery are brought to our Hospital in our buses. The entire pre-operative tests, surgery, post-operative reviews, medicines and follow up reviews are all offered free of cost to the patients, thus addressing both access and affordability.

The Hospital performs 50 cataract surgeries every day with an annual target of 10000 free cataract surgeries.

This project will improve the quality of living of people who are needlessly blind by providing surgical treatment and also followup reviews.