Doctor Venkataswamy established the first Aravind Eye Hospital in Tamil Nadu state with only eleven beds.

VOA: special.2010.04.27

And 15 kilometers away, an ophthalmologist at the Aravind Eye Hospital in the city of Theni diagnoses and treats him.

VOA: standard.2010.05.25

Aravind Eye Hospital has conducted mobile eye camps in villages across Tamil Nadu over the past two decades.

VOA: standard.2010.05.25

One of them, in India, was Aravind Eye Care, a for-profit hospital that treats the poor for little or no charge, subsidizing the care with fees it charges well-off patients. (See a Forbes article on Aravind here.) Moraes Neto co-authored a documentary film, Setor Dois e Meio (The Second-and-a-half Sector) about the journey that will be released later this year.

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And yet that is exactly what you will find at Aravind, the world's biggest eye-hospital chain, based in the town.

ECONOMIST: Health care in India

To ensure equity, each of the 329 eye doctors working at Aravind are rotated between the free and paying wings of the hospital.

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