Sankara Eye Hospital, India’s leading eye care institute, and Infosys, the country’s second largest IT firm together organized a free eye screening camp for more than 12, 000 government school children in Bangarupet taluk, Kolar district, Karnataka. The camp was inaugurated Mr. Satish Grampurohit – Associate Vice President, Infosys; Mr. Mahesh Kumar – Infosys Samparpan (CSR) Team Core member, Infosys; Mr. Vikram Chaudhuri – Unit Head, SEH; Mr. Kempaiah, Block Education Officer - Bangarupet and Mr. S.N. Narayana Swamy, MLA, Bangarupet, Kolar.
Sankara Eye Hospital has been training the Infosys employees since last year on ‘How to identify common eye conditions in the children’, and more than 200 trained Infoscions volunteered to screen the students at the camp.
Around 1600 students were identified primarily with eye defects by volunteers who have been recommended corrective measures as well as a free secondary screening at the hospital in Bangalore.
This Corporate volunteering initiative ‘Nanna Kannu’ was introduced to Sankara Eye Hospital by Ms. Amitha Pai, Founder of One Good Step, with an aim to eradicate blindness by providing a comprehensive Pediatric Eye care programme for children. This Happy Eyes Project is completely supported by Titan Company Ltd, where they provide spectacles and actively back the surgeries.
“In our constant endeavor to eliminate blindness, we organized this camp to provide free consultation and screening to the government school students in the district. We are overwhelmed with the response and are quite delighted that Infosys has come to the forefront to support the cause and has extended their complete support to organize the camp. Hope this association sets an example to others to take a step forward in the right direction towards the betterment of society and eliminating avoidable blindness”, said Mr. Vikram Chaudhuri, Unit head of, Sankara Eye Hospital, Bangalore.
“We at Infosys Bangalore are deeply committed to providing a “Platform for Purpose” for our employees. Through our 2000+ volunteer pool (called Team Samarpan), we are passionately taking on causes that make a difference to the society we live in. We are glad to join hands with Sankara Eye Hospital through the “Nanna Kannu” programme which aims at eradicating blindness among childern. During the recently concluded weekend drive, our trained volunteers participated in the preliminary screening drive in Bangarupet of Kolar district, where they covered over 12000 students from 356 schools. We are very glad to have been part of this noble initiative and to have helped the Hospital achieve this scale. We look forward to more of such engagements in the future,” said Mr. Gururaj Deshpande, Vice President, Infosys and Head of its Bangalore Development Center.
