Sankara Eye Foundation, with a mission to eradicate curable blindness, has achieved another key milestone with the inauguration of the SEF hospital in Indore, Madhya Pradesh in India. The hospital inauguration happened on Jan. 30. It was a well-attended event and with luminaries like Tulsi Ram Silawat, Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Gov’t of Madhya Pradesh, and Shankar Lalwani, Member of Parliament, in attendance. State and local officials and SEF’s amazing donors also graced the inauguration where the state-of-the-art facility was dedicated to the people of Madhya Pradesh.

The 225-bed Indore Hospital, in the heart of the city, is an architectural marvel integrating values and cultures of Sankara and Indore with operational excellence for an unparalleled service for the patients. The award winning outreach program, covering rural communities in 150 km radius around the hospital, will start in the coming weeks and will provide quality eye care to close to 7 million people. The Indore Hospital Vision Care Technicians, who underwent training for more than a year before the inauguration, were ready to serve on day one of the hospital inauguration and were beaming with joy in sharing their journey during the event.  The SEF staff exudes the culture of SEF with enthusiasm and customer obsession and serviced close to 100 patients on the very first day.

Established in the San Francisco Bay Area, SEF, USA, is a non-profit organization that has been working for the past twenty-two years for the cause of eradicating curable blindness in India. Driven by the truly inspirational cause, SEF, along with the new Indore Hospital has ten community-eye-care hospitals and is working on adding three more hospitals in Mumbai, Bihar and Hyderabad. By far, the most unique and remarkable characteristic of SEF hospitals is that 80 percent of the surgeries performed provide free eye care for those unable to afford it. The tireless efforts by the SEF team since inception, has enabled more than 1.99 million eyes (as of December 2019) to receive the gift of vision, utterly free of cost.  Also, it has maintained the 4-star top rating from Charity Navigator for sound fiscal management for the last seven years

Going forward, SEF, USA will focus its fundraising activities for the three upcoming hospitals and ongoing gift of vision surgery donations. Readers are requested to join the cause, volunteer and share in the joy of bringing light to someone’s eyes. Visit www.giftofvision.org for more details.