Hafizabad, 9 October 1880.
A middle-class home welcomed a boy whose father was already a doctor. The child was named Mathra Das. No one in that quiet Punjabi household could have imagined that this son would one day restore sight to hundreds of thousands and be called Netra-Dev — the God of Eyes.

As a medical student in Lahore, young Mathra Das stood at the back of the eye department one afternoon and watched Dr. Hari Ram teach a junior. Something stirred inside him.
“This,” he thought, “is where I belong.”

In 1901 he joined service. Two years later, on a cold January morning, the twenty-two-year-old Sub-Assistant Surgeon took charge of the Civil Dispensary at Moga. The place was lonely — a small building on the Ferozepur–Ludhiana road, separated from the village by thick jungle. Patients were few.

One evening he went to the Deputy Commissioner.
“Sir, give me permission to keep a table, an almirah and some medicines in the village itself. I will cycle there every evening after my duty.”

Permission was granted. He began riding his bicycle through dusty lanes, calling out to people:
“If your eyes trouble you, come to me. I will treat you free.”

In 1903 he performed only three cataract operations.
In 1904 the number rose to forty-three.
He gave free food. He paid the return fare of poor patients from his own pocket.

Then came the moment that changed everything.
A poor woman once called him to her hut. Her son was ill. Mathra Das examined the boy, wrote a prescription, and accepted the official fee of two rupees. Later he learned she had mortgaged her only thali — her metal plate — to pay him.

That night he sat alone and made a vow:
“From this day, no resident of Moga will ever pay me a single paisa — official or unofficial.”

He kept that promise for the rest of his life.

In the 1920s his campaign against cataract reached its peak. He invented his own technique of intracapsular extraction — faster, cleaner, safer. Foreign doctors travelled to Moga to learn from him. He allowed Indian trainees one operation a day, foreign trainees three. Group photographs were taken before they left. Later, when someone tried to claim the technique as his own, an American doctor who had trained in Moga in 1922 wrote to the journals:
“I saw this method years earlier in the hands of Dr. Mathra Das of Moga.”

The world quietly accepted the truth.

Patients poured in. Temporary sheds were raised around the hospital. On some days the queues seemed endless. Once he performed 750 operations in a single day. Over a lifetime the number crossed half a million. He never charged the poor.

Mahatma Gandhi watched him operate in Wardha in 1942 and wrote in Harijansevak:
“I bowed to Dr. Mathuradas in admiration for his unerring and quick surgical hand. He performed operations at the rate of one in a minute. There was scarcely a mishap. Thousands thus get back their eyes free…”

Gandhi called the work a yajna — a sacrifice.

Mathra Das was more than a surgeon. He became President of the Municipal Committee of Moga from 1924 to 1940. He planned the new town’s roads, plots and sewer system. He founded schools — Arya Putri Pathshala for girls in 1919 (rare in those days), Mathra Das Anglo-Sanskrit School, DM College of Education. He built a hospital on his own land that is still known today as Mathra Das Civil Hospital.

When the Maharaja of Kashmir’s mother needed surgery, Mathra Das operated and refused every reward.
“Does a son take money from his own mother?” he asked quietly.

Titles came — Rai Sahib, Rai Bahadur, Kesari Hind medals in silver and gold, Khilat Fakhra. In 1954 the young Republic of India placed the Padma Shri around his neck. He accepted it the same way he accepted praise — with a slight smile and a return to work.

Even after Partition forced the family from Lahore to Delhi, even after official retirement, the old surgeon kept operating. At ninety-two he was still restoring sight.

In 1972 the hands that had given light to half a million eyes finally rested.

Today in Moga, people still point to the hospital, the schools, the planned streets and say,
“This is Dr. Mathra Das’s Moga.”

And somewhere, perhaps, an old man or woman opens eyes that once saw only darkness and whispers the name that once meant hope:
Netra-Dev.