The 40th anniversary of Sankara Eye Hospital will be celebrated on 21st May 2017 with theme-'Netra Yagna'. This will be a year long celebration across all the Sankara Eye Care Hospitals in India. Apart from that a musical concert 'Keladi Kanmani' by playback singer S.P.Balasubramiam has been organised at Hindustan College on the evening of 21st May.
Dr.R.V.Ramani, Founder and Managing Trustee of Sankara Eye Foundation, while addressing the press shared Sankara's journey through the years. He said, "Our journey started with a small primary health care centre in R.S.Puram. Now we have registered our presence across India in the eye care sector. Healthcare needs are huge and the government cannot take care of such large demands by itself. Therefore, non-governmental organisations can supplement to cater to the needs of people.
Across globe one third of the visually impaired population is from India and 45 million people are visually handicapped. The irony is 80 percent of them are needlessly blind due to inaccessibility, non-availability and non-affordability of treatment. We have been treating such economically backward people free of cost.Sankara regularly organises gift of vision programme reaching out to the rural interiors, taking quality eye care to their door steps through an organised sytematic approach and an inbuilt follow up mechanism.
This has been conducted with the support of Rotary Central and Rotary International support. Through our initiatives we have provided 1.5 million free surgeries to the needy and have touched lives of nearly 1 crore people.
We had set five objectives to work upon which are creating awareness about eye donation, vision screening programme for school students, flagship programme of gift of vision in the rural areas, diabetic retinopathy programme for poor and state of the art world class hospital with a model of 80:20 where 20 refers to paying patient and 80 patients benefitting the free treatments."
The Sankara family now includes the best doctors, 1800 full time employees, dedicated volunteers, large number of service partners, donors, NGOs and Corporates. Sankara Eye Hospitals will very soon be serving Jaipur, Indore, Mumbai and Hyderabad as well.