Indian eye care group wins top world aid prize
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on Mar 06, 2010 
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Indian group Aravind Eye Care System, which performs 3,00,000 free or subsidised eye surgeries a year for the poor, will receive the world's largest humanitarian prize, jurors said on Friday.
Aravind, the world's largest eye care provider, was chosen for the $1.5 million Conrad N Hilton Humanitarian Prize, awarded annually to an organisation that does extraordinary work to alleviate human suffering.
The award will be presented April 20 in Redwood City, California. Aravind was one of almost 200 nominees for the prize, awarded each year since 1996 by the Hilton Foundation established by the late hotelier to help the world's poor.
Past winners include the medical group Doctors without Borders, Heifer International, an agency that works to end world hunger and the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims.
Aravind, founded in 1976 by the late Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, operates five hospitals in India backed by a network of clinics, manages four others, and has rsearch laboratories, a training centre and a manufacturing centre.
"Aravind's is a remarkable enterprise," Steven Hilton, CEO of the Hilton Foundation, told Reuters. "The impact of what they do is so broad — all with 70 percent of patients receiving the surgeries free or at very low cost."
Most of the world's estimated 45 million blind are in the developing world and some 12 million are in India.
"Over 80% of the developing world's blindness and impaired vision is needless, causing enormous personal and family suffering and severely limiting a country's ability to develop," said Dr P Namperumalsamy, Aravind's chairman, known as Dr Nam.
Extreme sun and a genetic predisposition mean cataracts often strike Indians in their 40s and 50s versus the 60s and 70s more common in the United States.
When he retired from India's government health service in 1976, Venkataswamy, known as Dr V, mortgaged his home to start an eye clinic with 11 beds in a rented house in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, in the southern tip of India.
Aravind has handled more than 29 million outpatients and performed more than 3.6 million surgerie
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