The Temple Of The Eye: A Kolkata Hospital That Still Keeps Its Founding Promise

 A Kolkata hospital that has spent seventeen years quietly doing its thing exceptionally well

Representational Image: IndianRepublic.in

There is a photograph on the wall behind the reception desk at the entrance. The man in it carries an unmistakable presence but it is the eyes that hold you. They seem to look directly at whoever is standing in front of them and they keep looking as you move, following your gaze until you have walked out of their sight altogether. You notice the eyes because of where you are. This is a hospital that does nothing but eyes and the man in the photograph is late Aditya Birla.

The full name is Aditya Birla Sankara Nethralaya, on the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass at Mukundapur in south Kolkata. It is a unit of Sankara Nethralaya, which in Sanskrit means the temple of the eye, and the name is more than we think. The institution began in Chennai in 1978, founded by the ophthalmologist Sengamedu Srinivasa Badrinath after Jayendra Saraswathi, the Sankaracharya of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, spoke two years earlier of the need for a hospital that would give good eye care to people. It was registered as a not-for-profit body under the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act of 1860, and it remains one.

That structure is important because most people assume the Birla name means a corporate hospital. It does not. The Aditya Birla Group came to the Kolkata branch much later, in 2011, when it was renamed. Rajashree Birla, chairperson of the Aditya Birla Foundation, said then that aligning with an eye hospital had been the late Aditya Birla's own wish. The ownership did not change hands but the philanthropy did.

Sankara Nethralaya came to Kolkata in December 2002, moved to a temporary address at Raja Subodh Mullick Square in 2007, and opened the permanent hospital at Mukundapur on 21 January 2009. It was inaugurated by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the then chief minister of West Bengal, and built on a little over half an acre in collaboration with the Paschim Banga Rajya Pratibandhi Sammilani.

Seventeen years later it treats between five and six hundred patients a day, under Medical Director Dr Sujata Guha and Deputy Director Dr Rupak Roy, with a team of thirteen consultants. Patients come from across Bihar, West Bengal and the north-east, and from Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal, after the doctors and hospitals in their immediate neighbourhoods have given up hope. It holds NABH certification.

What strikes a visitor first is how much of eye medicine turns out to exist. Most of us think of an eye hospital in terms of cataracts and spectacles. The departments here run to cataract, cornea, glaucoma, uvea, vitreoretina, medical retina, neuro-ophthalmology, oculoplasty, paediatric ophthalmology, strabismus and community ophthalmology. Alongside them sit specialist clinics that tell their own story about who walks through the door: a squint clinic, a myopia clinic, a low vision clinic, a binocular vision clinic, an adult amblyopia clinic, a special child clinic for children who cannot be examined in the ordinary way, and a clinic that makes custom prosthetic eyes.

The diagnostic list is similarly long, and most of it is unfamiliar until you need it. Pentacam and corneal topography and specular microscopy for the cornea. Pachymetry and visual field testing for glaucoma. Fundus fluorescein angiography and OCT for the retina. Electrodiagnostic testing for the ERG clinic. Digital biometry before surgery. These are not names anyone learns by choice.

The part that does not appear in the brochure photographs is an entire floor given over to community service, where treatment is free for patients who cannot pay, served by two operation theatres. A teleophthalmology wing carries screening out into rural and semi-urban West Bengal and Jharkhand, to people who would otherwise never see a specialist. It also teaches. The Kolkata hospital runs DNB and DO postgraduate courses in ophthalmology, fellowships and optometry internships, which means that a proportion of the country's next generation of eye surgeons is being trained in a building where a third of the work is done for nothing.

Some practical notes are important for anyone who needs this place. Appointments can be booked online, and the system is straightforward in a way that Indian hospital booking often is not. It is roughly as complicated as buying a railway ticket, which is a low bar that a surprising number of institutions fail to clear. The Kolkata unit operates from three addresses: Mukundapur on the EM Bypass, New Town in Rajarhat, and Raja Subodh Mullick Square near Wellington Square. The main line is 033 6657 6000.

Expect to wait. Five to six hundred patients a day is a great many people in a building of that size, and patient reviews online are not uniformly happy about queues or about the time it takes to get through on the phone. Anyone who has spent a morning in that waiting area will recognise both complaints. It is the arithmetic of a busy hospital rather than a failing of one, but it is worth knowing before you arrive. And it is not free for everyone. The free floor exists and is real but for those outside it this is a paying hospital with the costs any surgical procedure carries. Ask for the figure in advance. They will tell you. It is recommended to pay when you can so that those in need can really make most of the services available. 

None of which is really the point. The facilities are decent and the staff are very helpful but plenty of hospitals can manage decent and helpful tags. What a place like this is finally judged on is whether the doctors know what they are doing when the case is difficult and near to impossible, and whether they will take it on when others have decided it cannot be fixed.

That is a judgment no article should make on a reader's behalf. Eyes are particular, conditions differ, and one family's experience is not evidence. If something is wrong with your sight, see a doctor, and if you are told nothing can be done, it is worth asking someone else. But the name means temple of the eye and forty-eight years on from a conversation in Chennai about people who could not afford to see, the institution is still doing the one thing it was built to do. 

And the photograph at the reception is looking at all of it with an expression that gives nothing away even though it is worth remembering that of everything the name attached to it now stands for, this quiet half-acre in Kolkata may be the part that outlasts the rest.

(This is not a sponsored post or advertorial.)