Manohar Krishna Dole

Manohar Krishna Dole has devoted his life to free eye care for poor and tribal communities in rural Maharashtra. He was named for the Padma Shri in 2024 in the field of medicine, from Maharashtra ^[1].

To the village

He was born on 22 November 1928 into a middle-class family in Pune and qualified in Ayurvedic medicine from Pune University in 1953 ^[2]. At 31 he moved to Narayangaon, a village in the hilly Junnar taluka about 80 km away, to build basic health care where there was very little ^[2].

An eye hospital

Though not an eye surgeon himself, Dole saw that cataract blindness was the region’s biggest problem, and in 1982 he founded the Mohan Thuse Eye Hospital and Research Institute ^[2]. Its teams hold some 40 free eye camps a month in remote villages, bring patients to the hospital, and provide surgery, lenses, spectacles, food and lodging before taking them home, all free of charge ^[2].

According to his citation, the hospital has held more than 25,000 camps, examined more than 1.5 crore people and performed free eye surgery on more than 1.75 lakh people across five districts of western Maharashtra ^[2]. It gives special attention to women, set up the region’s first blood bank and eye bank, and since 2000 has trained more than 250 doctors in cataract surgery ^[2].