Meet Dr Sanduk Ruit, the Barefoot Surgeon who’s cured 130,000 of blindness

Born into the lowest tiers of a rigid caste system in a tiny remote village in the Himalayas, Sanduk Ruit started life with absolutely nothing to his name: no money and no connections. Few would have guessed that he would grow to become one of the most respected eye surgeons in the world and a titan of Asia who, in 2006, was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award – the Asian equivalent of a Nobel prize.

Now Dr Ruit has embarked on an ambitious new project to screen 1,000,000 people for cataract blindness and to cure between 300,000 and 500,000 new patients by 2026.

Dr Ruit has already been affectionately nicknamed the “God of Sight” after personally curing more than 130,000 people of blindness; and is also known as the “Barefoot Surgeon” thanks to his predilection for performing cataract surgery while barefoot.

Together with London-based technologist Tej Kohli, Dr Ruit has co-founded the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation with the objective of taking treatment for cataract blindness out into the world’s poor and underserved communities in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where blindness is a major inhibitor to social and economic development.

Dr Ruit’s journey to becoming Asia’s “God of Sight” has not been an easy one. Growing up in the foothills of the Himalayas on the border with Tibet, Ruit’s father was a salt trader. “My father always told me that if there is an easy path or a hard path, to choose the hardest one” says Ruit.

At the age of seven, Dr Ruit left his parents and trekked across the mountains for two weeks to get to a Jesuit boarding school in West Bengal. When fighting broke out between India and China it quickly became apparent that Ruit would not be able to trek back to his village in Nepal. He was 10 years old before he saw home again.

Then, when he was 19 years old and studying his entrance exams for medicine, Ruit lost his younger sister Yang La to tuberculosis. It was not the first tragedy in his family.

“I lost three of my siblings to diseases that would have been easily curable in the West” says Ruit. “I lost a brother to fever, a sister to diarrhoea and Tang La to tuberculosis. I found that unacceptable, completely unacceptable.”

In the 1980s Dr Ruit became the protégé of ophthalmologist Fred Hollows and developed a low-cost intraocular lens and surgical technique that, at last count, is being used in more than 60 countries and which is taught in US medical schools.

Dr Ruit has personally cured more than 130,000 people of blindness using his low-cost method, which has made treatment available to millions of blind and visually impaired people in the developing world.

“Nobody would have imagined someone from Nepal creating this new technique and then taking it all over the world,” says Dr Ruit. “Being a poor, brown-skinned person, I had to work a lot harder than anyone else. But it was also my advantage, because I understood the people that I was operating on a lot more than your average doctor.”

Dr Ruit’s native homeland of Nepal ranks among the top 10 countries in the world for the highest rates of vision loss, with 0.5 per cent of the population of 29 million living with blindness, and a further 26.7 per cent suffering some form of visual impairment. Ninety per cent of Nepal’s blind live in rural and remote areas and it is not uncommon for teams from the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation to trek for hours on foot to reach a remote village.

“If it takes me six hours to get to a village to give sight to 30 people, I consider that a very worthwhile way to spend a day” says Ruit. “Right from the start I was convinced that my job was to take medical care to these people. Often (after surgery) they look 10 years younger. Many remind me of plants unfurling toward the sun. They come in hunched over, and they leave standing upright. We are giving them back their life because they can work again and can contribute to their families.”

By co-founding the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation with Tej Kohli, Dr Ruit is expanding his work and his legacy outside of Nepal. The foundation plans to operate in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Pakistan, Indonesia, Laos and Bhutan during 2022 as it pursues its target to cure at least 300,000 of cataract blindness by 2026. It will do this by setting up mobile eye camps, often using tents, classrooms and even temples as makeshift operating rooms.

Dr Ruit is no stranger to taking treatment into the communities that other charities and NGOs cannot reach. After treating a North Korean diplomat in Kathmandu, Ruit persuaded the North Korean authorities to let him visit in 2006. Ruit conducted surgeries on 1,000 patients and trained many local surgeons.

Dr Sanduk Ruit has a long track record of taking on a system that was willing to ignore the poor and the forgotten, and his partnership with Tej Kohli will scale up Ruit’s method to reach hundreds of thousands of new patients.

“Because of my background, my family, and where I grew up, I understand them. I have experienced their life. It’s not just an intellectual idea. They are the most deserving people on Earth, and I am determined to do everything that I can for them” says Dr Ruit.

The Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation is a restricted fund operating under the auspices of Prism The Gift Fund, registered UK charity number 1099682.