Gullapalli N Rao

Gullapalli Nageswara Rao is an ophthalmologist who founded the L V Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, an eye hospital built on the explicit principle that half its services would be given free. He trained at Guntur Medical College and did his postgraduate residency in ophthalmology at AIIMS, New Delhi, then went to the United States, where he became an associate professor at the University of Rochester's School of Medicine and Dentistry. He has said that the decision to become an eye doctor came from his family's proximity in Chennai to Govindappa Venkataswamy, the founder of Aravind Eye Hospital.

In 1982 Rao and his wife Pratibha Rao decided to leave established careers in America and return to India to build an academic eye care centre that would combine clinical excellence with equity of access. They set up the Indo-American Eye Care Society in Rochester in 1984 to raise money for it, and registered the Hyderabad Eye Institute as a charitable trust; Pratibha Rao was its first major donor. The film producer L V Prasad gave the profits of his film Ek Duuje Ke Liye and about five acres of land, and the institute was named after him. It opened in 1987.

The institute's distinguishing idea is its five-tier Eye Health Pyramid, which places vision centres in villages, service centres and secondary centres above them, and tertiary and advanced tertiary hospitals at the top, so that a patient enters the system near home and is referred upward only as needed. The network now runs more than 300 centres across Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Karnataka, has provided over 36 million services, and reports that more than half of these were given entirely free regardless of the complexity of care. LVPEI is a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for the prevention of blindness and works through ten arms including eye banking, vision rehabilitation, rural and community eye health, research and advocacy.

Rao has served the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness as a board member, as secretary general in 1998 and as president in 2004, and chairs the Academia Ophthalmologica Internationalis. He received the Honor Award of the American Academy of Ophthalmology in 1983 and its International Blindness Prevention Award in 2006, was made a Fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences in 1996, was honoured by the Government of India with the Padma Shri, and was elected to the Ophthalmology Hall of Fame of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery in 2017. He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and holds several honorary doctorates.[2][3]