But their uncle persisted. On his next India trip, Sridharan visited the SES in Coimbatore and was very impressed. He saw a very clean, modern hospital and a very dedicated staff who were doing a wonderful job of taking care of the visually handicapped. He came back convinced that divine work was happening there, and that they must start a charity in the USA to support their work.

SES performs free eye surgeries on the visually handicapped poor and it was founded by Dr. R.V. Ramani in 1977. Volunteering doctors go to villages every weekend, screen patients, identify those needing eye surgeries, bring them back to the base hospital in Coimbatore where they stay for three days or so. These patients are given free food and free eye surgeries are performed on them before they are taken back to their villages by the buses run by SES for this purpose. The doctors also go back to these patients twice in the next twelve months and do a follow-up. Such high quality work results in over 98% success rate.

The two brothers were now on a mission.

“We approached my brother’s neighbor in San Jose, Ahmad Khushnood from Pakistan. Ahmad is a CPA and he helped us with the paper work to start Sankara Eye Foundation (SEF) in the USA and register it under section 501-c3 as a non-profit in the USA. We got the approval on May 21, 1998,” says Krishnamurthy.

However, the brothers were still not fully convinced of their purpose and were reluctant to approach friends and others to raise funds for SES India. “Slowly, by the end of 1998, we mustered enough courage and hand wrote to more than 100 friends and others seeking their help and raised close to $8,000 in the year 1998. SES India was performing around 8,000 free Eye Surgeries per year in 1998,” elaborates Krishnamurthy.

“We were getting more confident and started setting up booths at Indian events in the San Francisco Bay Area and conducted our own fundraiser on April 3, 1999. It was a Multi-Lingual Light Music event by our own group Pallavi at the Foothill College Theater in Los Altos, California. It was a houseful show of 930 people and we raised over $17,000 at this event. There was no looking back after this event. We raised over $70,000 in 1999 and we were reaching out to more and more people all over the USA and the number of free eye surgeries in India also started increasing – from 8,000 free eye surgeries in 1998 to 14,684 in 1999, to 25,748 in 2000, 28,691 in 2001 and so on.”

This is when their new volunteer Rajeev Chamraj met Krishnamurthy at his home and proposed a big vision – Vision 20/20 by 2020 for India. He said that any organization should have a big vision and SEF should work towards eradicating curable blindness in India by the year 2020 – Vision 20/20 by 2020. Krishnamurthy was not sure whether SEF, USA and SES, India could achieve this. He discussed the vision with the board members in the USA. Even though they were not sure of this in the beginning, they started to like the idea and proposed the vision to SES, India.

“They were also not sure this was achievable. Eventually though, all of us adopted this vision and started thinking big. Our goal was to perform one million free eye surgeries per year by the year 2020 and contribute to eradicating curable blindness in India by that year. Our progress continued and we performed 37668 free eye surgeries in 2002 and 44697 in 2003,” he says.

In the year 2001 they started looking for land for a new Sankara Eye Hospital in Andhra Pradesh and finally acquired a donated land near Guntur on the Guntur-Vijayawada highway. It was a beautiful five acre land and was donated to the foundation in 2002. The foundation partnered with the Bay Area Telugu Association (BATA) and Telugu Association of North America (TANA) and raised more than $1.5 Million dollars and built a 100 bed Sankara Eye Hospital at this site and it was inaugurated in the year 2004.

“We were performing over 10,000 free eye surgeries per year at this hospital. This helped us increase the total free eye surgeries to 51,311 in 2004,” says Krishnamurthy.

“This first major success gave both SEF and SES, India a lot of confidence and we boldly initiated three more projects in 2005 – Sankara Eye Hospital & Training Center in Bangalore, Sankara Eye Hospital in Anand, Gujarat and Sankara Eye Hospital in Shimoga, Karnataka. In 2004, the Sankara Rural Eye Hospital in Krishnan Koil near Madurai, Tamil Nadu was donated to us. A prime five acre land in Bangalore on the Airport Road near the airport was donated to us and this land is worth over Rs. 50 crores now.”

Construction of the three new Sankara Eye Hospitals (SEH) is progressing well. SEH-Bangalore is slated for inauguration in March 2008 and SEH-Shimoga and SEH-Anand will be inaugurated in the middle of 2008. All of these SEHs will be 200 bed hospitals. SEH-Guntur is also being expanded to a 200 bed hospital and this will be completed soon.

“Our partner ‘Mission For Vision’ in the UK is donating two more Hospitals to us – one in Pammal near Chennai and the other in Silvassa, UT of Dadra and Nagar Haveli,” says Krishnamurthy.

“We are now performing more than 57,000 free eye surgeries at our three SEHs in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh and by the end of 2008 we will have eight Sankara Eye Hospitals in India and we should be performing more than 100,000 free eye surgeries per year.”

“Until this year SEF, USA was run out of our house in San Jose, California and we have now moved into an office of our own in Milpitas, California so that we can manage this exciting growth better and we now have a full time office manager and two part-time data entry employees,” he continues.

What is the secret of SEF’s success? “I can easily list a few,” says Krishnamurthy readily. “Big vision, very committed and dedicated volunteers who are all very passionate about eradicating curable blindness in India, lots of hard work and most importantly very high quality work at our Sankara Eye Hospitals in India. All of us thoroughly enjoy this work and take it very seriously. Of course, none of this is possible without the unflinching support and encouragement of our donors all over the country and the support of many organizations like TANA, BATA, CLiPS, AKKA etc.”

SEF, USA and SES, India are working on a master plan which will include a roadmap to Vision 20/20 by 2020.

“Thinking back, I think this is the best thing that has happened in our lives and I now ask my uncle ‘Uncle, why did you not introduce this work to us even earlier than 1996, why did you wait so long?’” says Krishnamurthy.

How can you help SEF? Krishnamurthy makes an impassioned appeal to the community.

“Wherever you are, please become a part of ‘Vision 20/20 by 2020’ and help us spread this divine work in your city. Please contact us at 1-866-SANKARA or info@giftofvision.org or visit www.giftofvision.org. Become a volunteer today and start the booth and event activities in your city and help SEF get to Vision 20/20 by 2020.”

“One of the popular donations for our upcoming Hospitals is the ‘Founding Donor’ sponsorship. By donating $1,000, you can become a founding donor of any of our new Hospitals in Guntur, Bangalore, Anand or Shimoga and have the name of your beloved ones on the Hospital ‘Wall of Founders’. We still need to raise over three million dollars to complete these projects and we need your help now.”

“We are also ready to announce two new projects to build Sankara Eye Hospitals in the Northern States but before we could do that, we need to get the above four projects out of the way,” says Krishnamurthy.