Unfortunately, India is home to the world's largest blind population with more than fifteen million blind people. More disturbingly, most common cause of the blindness is cataract which can be treated with a surgery costing only 10 dollars. Similarly, more than 53 million people in country require reading glasses costing two dollars each but can’t afford them.

TEYE Org, a non-profit organization, started a project named Operation Vision to solve the problems of cataract related blindness amongst the elderly and to correct the vision of school age children. My family sponsored an eye camp under this project and I was impressed by the impact this camp had on my village. Since then, I have been helping Operation Vision project in fund raising and operations planning. 

In February 2007, as the lead fund raiser, I realized that TEYE was running out of money and I needed to do something quickly to raise funds.  My US employer has an Employee Foundation that sponsors good causes.  However, its policy was to sponsor the US focused projects only. I realized that Employer Foundation could be very helpful for providing sufficient funds to TEYE provided that I convince the Employer Foundation executive committee to fund initiatives in India. After three months of hard work which required me to go through operational and financial details of TEYE, convince Indian government officials and my personal network to match dollar for dollars for any funds raised, I came up with a great proposal for employer foundation: “For every dollar I raise through Employee Foundation, I will get 1 dollar in match from Government of India and another dollar from the TEYE members.  So for every dollar from Employee foundation will become 3 dollars and it will go a long way in our efforts to cure blindness in India”.  At first, Employer Foundation was a bit hesitant because they didn’t have enough knowledge about the working of TEYE and they needed assurance that their funds will be utilized effectively. I spent a great deal of time educating the Employee Foundation members about TEYE and Operation Vision. I arranged an in-person interview and showed some videos and pictures of TEYE operations, success stories and approach of effective utilization of its funds.   On June 14^th, I got a call from the President of our Employee Foundation with a congratulatory message.   For the first time in the 15 year history of our Employee Foundation, it had funded a cause outside US and it had awarded us with the highest amount in foundation's history.  Thanks to the matching contribution from TEYE members and from Government of India, our TEYE funds swelled to $120,000. This is the highest amount of funds TEYE ever had and the president of TEYE thanked me for positioning the organization for financial stability.

Since last two years, we have been using the funds to help perform cataract surgeries and to give eyeglasses to children.  Twelve hospitals across different regions of India are associated with this project.  More than 2000 people in India are having a better life due to the sponsorship of almost 32 Eye camps conducted around the country.  School screenings have been conducted and approximately 5000 children were given free eye glasses.  This is very fulfilling and I feel good whenever I hear success stories related to this initiative.