In a country hyped as “soon-to-be superpower”, facts about the eye care facilities are shocking. Almost 25 per cent of the world’s blind are in India, most of whom live in areas outside metros.

An estimated 75 per cent of India’s 12 million blind people suffer from avoidable blindness, since the country’s limited eye care infrastructure has only one eye surgeon per 1,00,000 people. These facts add up to the rockbottom awareness in rural India, which accounts for about 80 per cent of the country’s blind population.
Appalled by the sorry state of affairs, Rajat Goel, a management graduate from IIMA, bade goodbye to the corporate world, where he had scaled dizzy heights, and turned his thoughts towards the country’s ailing eye care scene.

“In rural India — due to high poverty rates and lack of access to hospitals and health resources — a large percentage of the people continue to neglect their eye problems. Though most of these cases are curable, they go untreated for lack of proper medical facilities and prohibitive costs. And, of course, due to lack of awareness,” says Goel, whose 10 out of 16 years of professional experience was in the field of eye care as director of Bausch & Lomb (surgical business).

“Though eye care is a specialised field and a service required by all, there are not many organised and specialised eye hospitals in India. The very few hospitals available are located in the metros,” says Goel, who is currently the CEO and  Managing Director of Eye-Q super speciality chain of eye hospitals.

As Goel says, while all those aged 65 and above are the most at-risk population for eye diseases, only a quarter of them get their eyes examined. “Lack of awareness and lack of access to eye hospitals are the main culprits,” he says.

Driven by the zeal to make eye care accessible and affordable to all, Goel and his team comprising seven other leading professionals in management and ophthalmology, set up the Eye-Q chain of hospitals.

“To begin with, we set up our first eye hospital in Rewari in Haryana. Since the health awareness level of people there was rock bottom, the Eye-Q team had to literally travel from one village to another conducting free eye camps and distributing medicines, free of cost. After 60 such camps, people woke up to the fact that most of their eye problems were curable and hence started pouring in to Eye-Q,” says Goel.

In a short span of eight months since its inception, Eye-Q, an ISO 9000 company, boasts of six hospitals in Haryana, Uttaranchal, Delhi and Rajasthan. “South, especially Karnataka, figures in our next phase of projects where we are planning to set up one hospital each in every district — except Bangalore as the city already has several good eye hospitals,” says Goel.

Compounding the problems dogging the field of eye care is the dramatic increase in age-related eye diseases like cataracts, diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma which, if left untreated, could lead to blindness, says Goel.

Another serious cause for concern, according to Goel, is the increasing number of people suffering from computer vision syndrome, a “new age” eye problem.

“Computer vision syndrome is the latest and the most widely prevalent of eye problems that needs to be tackled on a war footing, considering the growing number of computer users. This problem, in fact, affects productivity,” says Goel.