The Hindu Business Line : Seen from the heart

"Get me Rs 100 crore and I'll wipe out blindness from Tamil Nadu, where there are 9 lakh blind people. I will create 20 hospitals in the villages where free treatment will be given."

True to vision: Dr J. Agarwal and son, Dr Amar. Bijoy Ghosh

As tributes poured in after Dr Jaiveer Agarwal, founder of the Dr Agarwal's Group of Eye Hospitals, Chennai, ended his 50-odd year journey in ophthalmology on Sunday, my mind went back to the numerous chat sessions I had with the gentle, soft-spoken doctor over 25-odd years.

As a cub reporter covering the health beat, after each press conference or interview session, I would stay on a little longer to chat and share his dream of eradicating treatable blindness from India. That we should have so many blind millions. the numbers have only grown over the years and today the figure is between 12-15 million. was a thought that tortured him.

I interviewed him last in February 2006, after he had received a Padma Bhushan, and he began by asking me to close my eyes for a couple of minutes. "You won't be able to do it; so just imagine the plight of blind people."

He was already 76, and for the first time sounded tired and without hope. Not for his institution, mind you; the little eye clinic that he and his wife, Dr Tahira, with whom he had to elope from Jaipur after their inter-faith marriage, had set up in Chennai in 1957 had already expanded to several centres in Tamil Nadu and beyond. He and his team were being credited with ushering in several breakthroughs in eye care. He had pioneered Refractive keratoplasty with the cryolathe in India and cryoextraction in the 1960s, and under his guidance many other innovations were made by his centre. He had worked relentlessly for popularising eye donation and screening schoolchildren for defective vision.

But the tinge of despair in his voice pertained to lack of resources for his mission. "Get me Rs 100 crore and I'll wipe out blindness from Tamil Nadu, where there are 9 lakh blind people. I will create 20 hospitals in the villages where free treatment will be given."

When one mumbled that this wasn't that huge an amount, he said: "Then get it for me; this is my dream. I've tried for 15 years to collect this amount but have now given up hope and decided I'm incapable of raising this money."

"Yes, Papa's dream was to eradicate blindness in India," says his son and managing director of the group, Dr Amar Agarwal. "Cataract is the cause of blindness for about 55 per cent of the 12-15 million blind Indians. What pained him was that these people were blind not due to cancer or some genetic disorder, but simple cataract. Isn't it a shame for India to have 8 million blind from cataract?"

Reaching small places

Dr Amar adds that his father's vision was to establish hi-tech centres providing quality care not in big cities but small towns and even villages. "When my parents started in 1957 they were not even seeing one patient a day. Today, thanks to his vision, every day we see 3,000 patients in our 30 eye hospitals, with 150 eye doctors." And in remote villages, regular eye camps are conducted to screen people for eye ailments.

Overwhelmed by the tributes that are pouring in - Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi was one of the first callers on Monday morning - Dr Amar says, "More than anything else, he was a good human being, and those who remember him range from very small people to the State's Chief Minister. His focus was always on how to help poor patients. We now do about 100 surgeries a day in the main centre, at least 40 are done free, and these patients are given both food and transport."

Adds B. Sudha, a director at Dr Agarwal's Hospital, "Some of the people Dr Jaiveer treated came from the road and were so poor that they had to be bathed and shaved before they could go into the theatre. Another trait of his was that he would allow all his doctors to use the latest and most expensive equipment."

On his father's focus on eye care in small places, Dr Amar says: "He'd say that by the time a small child in a village with eye injury reaches an eye centre, his eye is lost. For instance, a child who hurts his eye when playing with a bow and arrow loses vision if his transfer to an eye hospital takes 5 or 6 hours."

Recently, while opening a new centre in Elampillai, a small town near Salem, he saw a boy who had swallowed rat poison after failing in Std X exam. "The parents brought him there blind; had he come immediately, medicines could have arrested nerve damage. Now even corneal transplant can't help because his nerve is gone."

Daughter-in-law Dr Athiya Agarwal will miss most the late Dr Jaiveer's "passion and compassion for poor patients." She has inherited his legacy as general manager of the Eye Research Centre which provides free treatment to poor patients. He groomed her for the job for two years and convinced her that she had the "heart" to carry on this work. So the onus is on her to conduct surprise checks at the facility for poor patients and "ensure they get quality treatment like other patients".

Personal loss

At a personal level she will miss him as a father. "Amar and I started dating in MBBS III year; I'm a Muslim, so he said you have to meet my parents. I had no idea of taking up ophthalmology but he literally brainwashed me: `tum kya karongy surgery ke saath, tum kya karongi paediatrics ke saath, you have to do only ophthalmology.' By the time I finished MBBS, he had convinced me and then encouraged, guided and supported me, taking care of my children when I travelled, giving me opportunities, organising funds for my foreign visits, etc."

A longtime colleague, former Director of the Institute of Ophthalmology and former vice-chancellor of the TN Medical University Dr K. Anandakannan, who first came into contact with Dr J. Agarwal as a PG student in 1971, will remember him most for "his dynamism, his organisational capacity to hold international ophthalmic events in Chennai and bringing hi-tech ophthalmology to India; others followed, but he was the first. He had great vision and always encouraged us professionally."

It is fitting that the eyes of a man with so much passion for eye care should live on in two others. His eyes were harvested and transplanted by both Dr Amar and Dr Athiya on two patients, just as they had done with Dr Tahira's eyes. And just like Dr Jaiveer had done with both his parents' eyes. "It is something that comes automatically to us; when I see the smile on the face of the woman who has my mother's eye, it is such a huge reward," says Dr Amar.

Takes one back to Dr Jaiveer's last interview: "The greatest gift I can give anybody is vision; I have nothing more to give."

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