Case on Aravind Eye Care
Task
Your task is to present organizations assigned to your group, discuss them from the perspective of topics addressed in the Frugal Innovation report, and to discuss what, if anything, can be transferred and used in the developed countries. Alternatively, you may brainstorm about the possibilities how some business from the developed countries could work with and help these organizations.
Introduction
About 40 million people in the world are blind and India is home to 1/3 of the world’s blind population. Yet, for many of these cases, it is preventable and treatable. In developing countries, the leading cause of blindness is attributed to cataracts, in which the natural lens of the eye clouds over time. This requires surgical removal and replacement with an artificial one. In 2006 alone, India had nearly 7 million cataract-blind individuals, with roughly 3.8 million new cases occuring every year. However, with 25% of Indians considered below the poverty line and with much larger numbers at income levels that would place such treatments for blindness out of their reach.
Many of these afflicted live in the rural areas and are mostly farmers... to rob one of sight usually meant robbing them of their livelihood and their ability to provide.
Yet, in the past decades, the country’s capacity to perform such eye surgeries have grown four-fold from 1.2 million in 1991 to 5 million a year in 2006. Much of this is credited to the efforts of a Doctor Govindappa Ventakaswamy (Or Dr. V) and the hospital he founded, Aravind Eye Hospital.
The surgeons at Aravind are world class, among the most productive in the world, doing as much as 13 times the amount of eye surgeries than their counterparts in the United States and yet having fewer complication rates than health systems in developed countries. But what is truly astonishing about Aravind is that nearly half of the procedures it conducts every year are practically free. For many years, India’s Aravind Eye Care
Your task is to present organizations assigned to your group, discuss them from the perspective of topics addressed in the Frugal Innovation report, and to discuss what, if anything, can be transferred and used in the developed countries. Alternatively, you may brainstorm about the possibilities how some business from the developed countries could work with and help these organizations.
Introduction
About 40 million people in the world are blind and India is home to 1/3 of the world’s blind population. Yet, for many of these cases, it is preventable and treatable. In developing countries, the leading cause of blindness is attributed to cataracts, in which the natural lens of the eye clouds over time. This requires surgical removal and replacement with an artificial one. In 2006 alone, India had nearly 7 million cataract-blind individuals, with roughly 3.8 million new cases occuring every year. However, with 25% of Indians considered below the poverty line and with much larger numbers at income levels that would place such treatments for blindness out of their reach.
Many of these afflicted live in the rural areas and are mostly farmers... to rob one of sight usually meant robbing them of their livelihood and their ability to provide.
Yet, in the past decades, the country’s capacity to perform such eye surgeries have grown four-fold from 1.2 million in 1991 to 5 million a year in 2006. Much of this is credited to the efforts of a Doctor Govindappa Ventakaswamy (Or Dr. V) and the hospital he founded, Aravind Eye Hospital.
The surgeons at Aravind are world class, among the most productive in the world, doing as much as 13 times the amount of eye surgeries than their counterparts in the United States and yet having fewer complication rates than health systems in developed countries. But what is truly astonishing about Aravind is that nearly half of the procedures it conducts every year are practically free. For many years, India’s Aravind Eye Care