By Professor Gnanaharan

July 2006

Dr.Govindappa Venkataswamy affectionately and appropriately called as Dr.V is no more. Is it possible to see Dr.V now? We can see the Vision of Dr.V through the thousands of poor people who got the vision by undergoing surgery at Aravind Eye Care System, the organisation he created. Dr.V lived upto what Martin Luther King Jr. had said about compassion. "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a begger; it comes to see that an edifice which provides beggers need restructuring".

Dr.V one of the proud recipients of the Helen Keller International Award has lent newer meaning and substance to Helen Keller's celebrated quote on Vision. She was once asked,"What can be worse than losing your sight?" Her answer: Losing your vision". Dr.V, by having a vision to eliminate all needless blindness in India, and establishing a clutch of Eye Hospitals in the name of Aravind restored sight for thousands of poor people and prevented many more thousands from going blind.

Aravind in the process has set world beating standards of efficiency and economics in eye surgeries. In other words, Dr.V has shown to the world how quality eye care can be made available to the poor by achieving efficiency in operations, which in turn can be ensured by just following simple management practices.

Aravind's innovation in management starts with the organisation of workflow from patient identification to post operative care. But it does not stop with this. While its steadfast adherence to the basic principles of management promotes utmost efficiency the theory of cross-subsidisation works overtime to ensure its financial sustainability. Aravind does more than three-fourth of its operations for free.

It is abundantly clear that Dr.V is a 'social entrepreneur' par excellence though he did not have any particular liking for anything related to business. That in a way can be considered as a measure of success of his vision-driven organisation. To the management guru Peter F. Drucker, social entrepreneurs are the people who "raise the performance capacity of the society". Viewed from this perspective, Dr.V doubly fits into this definition.

First he raised the performance capacity of poor people who had undergone eye surgeries in any of the Aravind Hospitals and secondly by increasing the capacity of doctors who make eye surgeries. The latter has far-reaching implications and impact on the eye care delivery system at the global level.

So the best way to pay homage to Dr.V would be to create Aravind like organisations based on the basic principles of sustainability and scalability. By replicating the experiment, many of the socio-economic problems confronting the nation can be made a thing of the past. If only we can see the power of Dr.V's Vision!