Murugappa Channaveerappa Modi — better known as M. C. Modi — was born on 4 October 1916 in Bilagi, in what is now Bagalkot district of Karnataka. Inspired by a speech of Mahatma Gandhi, the young medical student resolved to take eye care to the poorest and remotest parts of the country.

He began holding free eye camps in 1943. Over the next six decades he travelled across India with a mobile team, turning school halls, community centres and temples into temporary operating theatres. Using a system of assembly-line surgery with local anaesthesia, he performed cataract operations at remarkable speed and safety. On one legendary day at Tirupati in 1968 he completed 833 cataract surgeries, a feat recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. By the end of his career he had examined more than ten million people and restored sight to over seven hundred thousand through surgery, most of it free of cost.

In 1980 he founded the M. C. Modi Charitable Eye Hospital in Bengaluru, which continues his work today. The people of Karnataka affectionately called him “Kannu Kotta Anna” — the brother who gives eyes.

Colleagues and patients remembered a man of tireless energy and simple devotion. One young assistant, watching him move swiftly from table to table under the glare of a generator-powered lamp, later recalled Modi saying:

“The operating room is my temple, the instruments are my prayer, and the patient is my God. Service is the only pilgrimage that matters.”

The Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri in 1956 and the Padma Bhushan in 1968. He also received the Karnataka Rajyotsava Award and was nominated to the Karnataka Legislative Council. He died in Bengaluru on 11 November 2005 at the age of eighty-nine, having donated his own eyes.

In the story of Indian doctors, Murugappa Channaveerappa Modi stands as the pioneer of mass eye surgery — the surgeon who brought the gift of sight to millions who would otherwise have lived in darkness.