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W11212 ARAVIND EYE CARE SYSTEM: PROVIDING TOTAL EYE CARE TO
THE RURAL POPULATION Sanal Kumar Velayudhan, Meenakshi Sundaram R. and Thulasiraj R. D. wrote this case solely to provide material for class
discussion. The authors do not intend to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a managerial situation. The authors may
have disguised certain names and other identifying information to protect confidentiality.
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Copyright © 2011, Richard Ivey School of Business Foundation Version: 2011-09-29 In 2010, Aravind Eye Care System was the world’s largest provider of eye care services. Each day, it
handled an average of 6,000 outpatients, performed between 850 and 1,000 surgeries and conducted
between four and five outreach camps that examined 1,500 patients and transported 300 patients for
surgery. The growth of Aravind Eye Care System was phenomenal but the mission set by its founder — of
eliminating needless blindness — was an enormous task. This task was now being expanded to provide
total eye care, in response to the available evidence on the widespread prevalence in India’s rural areas of
moderate visual impairment and other eye-related problems. The outreach eye camps reached only seven
per cent of the people in remote villages who had eye problems. As a result, the top management at the
Aravind eye hospital faced the need to reach out to and cure a much larger percentage of the affected
people in the rural areas.
FORMATION AND GROWTH Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy started Aravind Eye Care System (Aravind), in Madurai city in the south
Indian state of Tamil Nadu, as an eye clinic and an 11-bed hospital in 1976, with the idea of creating a
sustainable eye care system. A year later, 23 more beds were added in another building referred to
internally as the Annexe. At the same time, to address the firm’s mission to serve poor blind people, a lowcost facility with 100 beds was added exclusively for those who required free treatment, marking the
beginning of the firm’s contribution to restoring eyesight to the millions of people with poor vision.
Aravind Eye Care System included five hospitals, which, each year, collectively performed more than
275,000 surgeries and laser procedures. In addition to the hospitals in Tamil Nadu, Aravind Eye Care
System helped the eye hospitals in Gujarat, Kolkata and Uttar Pradesh to develop management capabilities
and then handed these hospitals over to the promoters (NGOs, societies, trusts and corporations). Aravind
grew by increasing both its area of operation and the range of eye care services it offered. The eye care
system included an eye bank, an ophthalmic equipment and supplies manufacturing plant; a medical
research foundation; community outreach programs; community-based primary- and secondary-care eye This document is authorized for use only in Laureate Education, Inc. ‘s MMHA 6800 – Marketing Management and Business Communications for Health… course at Laureate Education