Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation Co-Founder Dr Sanduk Ruit Honoured For ‘Services To Humanity’ By The Kingdom Of Bahrain.

• Dr Sanduk Ruit is co-founder of the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation which has cured 27,936 of cataract blindness since its inception in 2021.
• The Isa Award for Services to Humanity is granted by the Kingdom of Bahrain once every two years to an individual that has served humanity in a profound way.

Co-founder of London and Kathmandu-based NGO the Tej Kohli and Ruit Foundation, Dr Sanduk Ruit, has been announced as the next recipient of the Isa Award for Services to Humanity by the Kingdom of Bahrain.

Affectionately known as the ‘God of Sight’, Dr Sanduk Ruit was born into humble beginnings in a rural area of the Taplejung District in foothills of the Himalayas. Dr Ruit excelled in his studies, and the untimely deaths of all three of his siblings from ailments that would have been easily treated in the West ignited within him a desire to train to become a doctor.

After graduating Dr Ruit focused on treating people for cataract blindness and vowed to develop new methods and institutions to provide quality, affordable and sustainable eye care to prevent and cure untreated cataract blindness within the remote and impoverished communities of the developing world.

In 1994 Dr Ruit founded the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology in Nepal, and established an intraocular lens factory that reduced the cost of the IOLs used during cataract surgery from 150 USD to under 3 USD, making cataract surgery accessible at scale for the first time to people in low-income countries. Dr Ruit also pioneered a low-cost surgical method for treating cataract blindness that is today taught in many regions focused on curing cataract blindness in the developing world.

Dr Ruit has personally performed surgery to cure the blindness of well over 130,000 patients at mobile eye camps in Nepal, India, Bhutan, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Ghana and even in North Korea. In 2021 Dr Ruit co-founded the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation with an ambition to cure at least 300,000 more people in the developing world by 2030.

Dr Sanduk Ruit has previously been awarded Asian of the Year 2007, The Order of Australia 2007, the Prince Mahidol Award of Thailand 2007, and the National Order of Merit (Gold) from the King of Bhutan 2015. In 2006 he was awarded the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award. In 2017 he was picked by Albert Einstein Foundation as one of “Hundred Leading Global Visionaries of the Century”. I n 2018, the government of India conferred upon Dr Ruit the coveted Padma Shri Award.

Tej Kohli, co-founder of the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation, said of the award:

“We are delighted that Dr Ruit has again been recognised for his truly unique and amazing contribution to humanity. We are all extremely proud to work under his guidance and to support this great man in building a legacy of social and economic change.”

For more information about the Tej Kohli & Ruit Foundation visit:

https://tejkohliruit.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@TejKohliRuitFoundation

https://www.instagram.com/tejkohliruit/

https://medium.com/@tejkohliruitfoundation

For more information about the Isa Award visit:

https://www.isaaward.org/