Dr. Sohrabji Pestonji Shroff (S. P. Shroff / Sorabji P. Shroff)
The ophthalmologist who turned a single room into a century of sight

In the early years of the twentieth century, when blindness was too often accepted as fate in India, a young Parsi ophthalmologist returned home with a different conviction. Sohrabji Pestonji Shroff began practising in Delhi around 1914. He saw what others had normalised: preventable and treatable eye disease that left the poor in darkness while the privileged sought care elsewhere.

In 1922 he founded a charitable trust. By 1927 the present building of Dr. Shroff’s Charity Eye Hospital stood in Daryaganj, inaugurated in the presence of the Vicerene. From the beginning the principle was clear and uncompromising: the same standard of care for every patient, whether they could pay or not.

Patients remembered a doctor who examined the poorest man with the same care he gave the wealthy. One elderly attendant later recalled a crowded morning clinic:

“Doctor Sahib, this man has no money and the cataract is mature.”

Shroff looked up from the examination. “Then we operate. Sight is not a privilege. It is a right we restore.”

That simple conviction shaped the institution. Through the decades of colonial rule, Independence, and the early years of the Republic, the hospital grew into one of the most important eye-care centres between Lahore and Delhi. It treated cataract, glaucoma, infections, and injuries; it trained young doctors; and it never abandoned its charitable core.

In 1963 the Government of India recognised a lifetime of healing and institution-building with the Padma Shri. By then Dr. Shroff had already planted something larger than himself. The hospital he founded continued to expand under the care of his family and successive generations of ophthalmologists. Today it stands as one of North India’s major tertiary eye institutes, still guided by the original mandate that half its work must remain free or heavily subsidised.

Sohrabji Pestonji Shroff did not live to see the full century of the institution he began. Yet the hospital that bears his name — now a network of centres and vision outposts — remains living proof of his belief: that excellence and compassion can, and must, coexist.

In a book about Indian doctors, he represents the quiet founders — men who measured success not by personal fame but by the number of people who walked out of their clinics able to see the world again. A single room in Daryaganj became a century of restored sight because one ophthalmologist refused to accept darkness as destiny.