In the remote Himalayan village of Olangchung Gola in eastern Nepal, near the Tibetan border, a boy named Sanduk Ruit was born on 4 September 1954. The nearest school was a week’s walk away. There was no electricity, no hospital. When Sanduk was seventeen, his sister died of tuberculosis—a disease that could have been treated if help had been closer. That loss decided his future. He would become a doctor so that no family would suffer the same helplessness.

With scholarships he studied medicine at King George’s Medical College in Lucknow and later specialised in ophthalmology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Returning to Nepal, he worked at Bir Hospital and then trained further in Australia under the legendary eye surgeon Fred Hollows. There he mastered modern cataract surgery with intraocular lenses. But the lenses cost a hundred dollars—far beyond the reach of the poor.

Sanduk refused to accept that blindness should be permanent simply because of poverty. He refined a suture-less, small-incision technique that could be performed in under five to seven minutes, even in remote tents. He then built a factory at the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology in Kathmandu to manufacture high-quality lenses for just a few dollars. The cost of cataract surgery dropped by ninety per cent. Suddenly the poorest villagers could see again.

He founded Tilganga and co-founded the Himalayan Cataract Project. Every week the centre treats thousands of patients, many free of charge. He has personally restored sight to more than 100,000 people—some say over 250,000—across Nepal, India, Bhutan, Tibet, Africa and beyond. He has ridden horses over mountain passes, waded rivers and operated by torchlight in places where no other surgeon would go. Patients call him the “God of Sight.”

One day an elderly woman, blind for years, opened her eyes after surgery and whispered, “Doctor, I can see my grandchildren’s faces again.”

Sanduk Ruit smiled gently. “Then my work is done for today. Tomorrow there will be more eyes waiting.”

In 2006 he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award. In 2018 the Government of India conferred upon him the Padma Shri for making quality cataract surgery affordable to millions. He continues to train surgeons from dozens of countries so that the gift of sight can travel even farther.

From a boy who walked for days to school in the high Himalayas to the surgeon who has opened the eyes of the world’s poorest people, Dr. Sanduk Ruit’s journey remains a luminous story of skill, compassion and unwavering determination.