Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore   

Sankara Eye Centre adjudged top NGO for community eye care programme

COIMBATORE: Sankara Eye Care Institutions that include the Sankara Eye Centre here, has been adjudged the ‘Number One NGO of India’ by The Nand and Jeek Khemka Foundation and The Resource Alliance for its free community eye care programme.

The award carries a citation and a purse of Rs. 4 lakh, Managing Trustee of the centre R.V. Ramani, told presspersons here recently.

He received the award in New Delhi recently from Member of the Planning Commission Sayeeda Hammed.

The Sankara group was among many major contestants such as the Aga Khan Foundation and Bharti Airtel Foundation. Non-Governmental organisations (NGOs) involved in the areas of agriculture, education and health were considered for the award.

Chairman of the institutions S.V. Balasubramaniam said the award was in recognition of excellence in the non-profit outreach programme of removing curable blindness. The performance of non-Governmental organisations from across the country was scrutinised by teams of the organisations that had instituted the award.

Nine months of minute study in each aspect of the programmes of the NGOs was done. A two-member team even stayed at the Sankara Eye Centre to make an on-the-spot assessment.

The efficiency of the centre’s systems and practices and how effectively it reached out to the proper target group were some of the areas of assessment. “This is a great recognition for 33 years of service in community eye care,” Dr. Ramani said.

At a time when only 25,000 pairs of eyes were donated across the country as against the need for 1.5 lakh pairs a year,

Sankara’s centres received a pair of eyes every day as donation to those who need corneal transplant.

The demand-supply gap remained wide as the message of eye donation was yet to reach larger sections of the public. “We want young people who pledge their eyes to take this message to the older generation, such as their grandparents or elders in the neighbourhood,” he said.

After replicating the Coimbatore centre at Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, Bangalore and Shimoga in Karnataka, Nasik in Maharashtra and Anand in Gujarat, Sankara planned to establish similar well-equipped centres in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Rajasthan. Efforts were on to increase the number of free eye surgeries from the present 85,000 a year to one lakh.

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