Hoshiarpur Mid Town × Plano Metro · since 2018
A clouded cornea is blindness. Replacing it takes one operation.
We pay for corneal transplants in northern India — the surgery, the cornea and the medicines. The patient pays nothing at all.
Left to right, this picture clears. That is the whole operation: light scattered by a clouded cornea, then a donated graft, then sight.
The project in four numbers
The cornea is the clear window at the front of the eye
When it clouds or scars — from injury, infection, malnutrition or a birth defect — light stops reaching the retina and vision goes. About 900,000 people in India are blind from corneal disease that could have been prevented or treated (2023 estimate), and government estimates put new cases at 20,000 to 30,000 a year.
Corneal transplantation is the main treatment. In the United States, eye banks report that more than 95 percent of transplants succeed; success is lower for corneas scarred by infection. The obstacle is not medicine; it is that a family earning a daily wage cannot pay for surgery, and that donated corneas are scarce. This project removes the first obstacle entirely and campaigns on the second.
How a transplant happens
-
A patient is identified
Through Rotary clubs, partner hospitals and word of mouth across Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jammu & Kashmir.
-
An eye bank supplies the cornea
Recovered within hours of a donor’s death and kept viable in preservation medium. Most transplants happen within a week of recovery.
-
A partner hospital operates
Guru Ka Langar Eye Hospital in Chandigarh, Dr. Shakeen’s Eye & Dental Hospital in Amritsar and others, under a signed MOU. Free of cost.
-
The patient is followed up
Post-operative checks confirm the graft has taken and vision has returned. Every case is recorded against the project’s numbered series.
The register
Every transplant is numbered
The clubs keep a running series. These are recent recipients — shared with their consent, with the surgeon, the hospital and the number that makes each account checkable.
Donate
Two hundred dollars is one person’s sight, returned to them for the rest of their life.
The operation, the donated cornea and every medicine afterwards. The patient is charged nothing at any stage.