Focus on Bihar - East Champaran

The MHKS hospital, Motihari

The MHKS is located in the worst place for blindness in the whole of Bihar.
East Champaran district is also where Second Sight started our work in the early 2000s when a continuous rota of volunteer eye surgeons operated at Dr Helen Rao’s eye department in Raxaul. Now the MHKS has taken up her mantle and has built up enormous support from local people. Once the Covid-19 lockdown was lifted in Bihar the hospital was ready, equipped with PPE and with new safety protocols in place, to handle the huge rush of patients.

The hospital is run by Dr. Dhiraj Ranjan (wearing a jacket in the photo below).

Nothing builds trust better than taking skilled ophthalmic staff into the heart of the community.

Equipped with appropriate technology like the solar-powered pocket ophthalmoscope, ophthalmic assistants like Sonu Sumant Manoj can diagnose problems other than cataract, educate patients and ensure that blind patients who need urgent surgery are never missed.

This highly personalised village screening is very different from the method used by paid middlemen. These are men who act on behalf of distant and usually very large hospitals wishing to increase their surgical numbers. They take money from villagers with visual problems and promise free surgery at a base hospital or temporary eye ‘camp’ hundreds of kilometres away.

Thanks to the reputation of the MHKS as a permanent, reputable eye hospital run for and by local residents, people in East Champaran are now far less likely to be exploited in this way.