Govindappa Venkataswamy

Venkataswamy retired as a government eye surgeon at fifty-eight and in 1976 opened an eleven-bed hospital in Madurai with family members who were also doctors. His surgical experience drove the model: standardised cataract operations done in high volume, borrowing ideas from McDonald's assembly lines, with paying patients subsidising free care for the poor. Aravind is a non-profit, but it pays its own way, and it later built a lens factory to cut costs further.