Govindappa Venkataswamy

Govindappa Venkataswamy, known to everyone as Dr V, was born in 1918 in a village in Tamil Nadu, the eldest son of a farmer. He trained in medicine in Madras, served in the Indian Army Medical Corps, and planned a career in obstetrics. Then, in his late twenties, severe rheumatoid arthritis put him in bed for the better part of two years and left his fingers permanently bent.

He could no longer deliver babies, so he retrained in ophthalmology, teaching himself to hold instruments in his twisted hands, and in time became a professor and head of the eye department at Madurai Medical College, where he organised the first mobile eye camps in rural India.

He retired at fifty-eight in 1976, and with his brothers and sisters, several of them doctors, opened an eleven-bed eye clinic in a rented house in Madurai. The idea was to treat cataract, which was blinding millions of Indians needlessly, on a scale that matched the problem. He admired the consistency of McDonald's and wanted surgery run the same way: standardised, high-volume, with surgeons doing nothing but operating while assistants handled everything else. Patients who could pay did, and their fees covered those who could not, about half the total. When imported lenses proved too dear, Aravind set up its own factory, Aurolab, and drove the price down to a few dollars.

Dr V never married and lived simply. He died in 2006. Aravind has since restored the sight of millions of people.