Nepali surgeon with a vision for the world

Bidya Prasad Pant was a junior ophthalmic assistant at Geta Eye Hospital in Dhangadi when a 70-year-old man, blinded by cataract, was brought in by a relative who carried him for a week in a bamboo basket from Bajhang. 

Back then in 1984, the charity-funded hospital only performed cataract operations when its Nordic surgeons were visiting. So the man had to be turned away.  

“It made me feel helpless, my inability to help the man touched me deeply. I made up my mind to be an eye surgeon myself,” Pant told us just before flying to Copenhagen to receive this year’s Boberg-Ans Award from the Danish Ophthalmological Society on 27 September for 'significant contribution to the dissemination and advancement of cataract surgery in the developing world'.

In the past 40 years, Pant has done over 200,000 eye surgeries in Nepal, Burma, and around the world. He possibly holds the record for most eye surgeries: 312 in one day and 16,005 in one year.

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Pant shuns publicity, and agreed to this interview after repeated requests. His is an extraordinary journey of determination, perseverance -- and vision.

The cheapest and fastest way to become a doctor those days was to go to Russia. Pant left his wife with three children at home and went to Russia in 1992 and graduated in 1999 from Rostov-on-Don, specialising in eye surgery. He was then invited by his surgeon colleague from Geta, Dag Riise, to Hamar in Norway to get further training in ocular operations.

The conflict was raging in Nepal, and Riise offered Pant a job in Hamar, but he refused. Pant did not just return to Nepal, but came back to Dhangadi to rejoin Geta. 

Riise regarded Pant as his “Nepali son” and the family invited him for his funeral in 2013 after he drowned at age 81 during a skiing accident. Back in Nepal, Pant devoted his life to expanding Geta, which offered free surgeries to patients from Nepal and India. 

Bidya Pant was trained as his surgical assistant by Albert Kolstad who founded Geta Eye Hospital in 1982 as a WHO and Norwegian government project. Kolstad’s wife Sissel Halden remembers Pant as a “gifted young man”. She adds: “My husband noticed his potential immediately. Bidya was smart, a fast learner and he started doing cataract surgery under supervision. His work as a surgeon was outstanding.”

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When an Indian diplomat visiting Dhangadi noticed that 85% of the patients at Geta were from India, the embassy helped build an annexe to the hospital. More surgeons were trained, and at one point the hospital was performing 45,000 surgeries a year.

Pant worked with HelpMeSee to perform free surgeries in Nepal, and also on board DC-10s of Orbis, the flying eye hospital hopping to airports all over Africa, Asia and Latin America. 

Since 2014, Pant has been doing free eye surgeries for Australia's DAK Foundation in developing countries, and he and his team have performed 300,000 operations just in Burma.  

The need is still great because of the backlog of ageing patients, and greater ultraviolet solar radiation risk at higher altitudes due to the thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer. Cataract is the cause of more than half the blindness worldwide, and this will increase by 70% in the next 25 years. 

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One of the neediest places is the Burmese hinterland near Mandalay where Pant leads a team of surgeons at Tipitaka Chalupala Eye Hospital and Monastery.

“When I first went to Yangon in 2013 there were people waiting up to six months in queue for eye surgery,” recalls Pant. Burmese Nepalis were excited a doctor from Nepal was doing the operations.

When his father died last year in Dhangadi, Pant’s Burmese patients collected more than $4,500 as donation, which he promptly handed over to the monastery. 

Pant was not just operating, but also helping Burmese surgeons to be trained at Kathmandu’s Tilganga and other hospitals. 

For his work in Burma, Pant was recognised by the British Medical Journal with the Surgical Team of the Year award, and the International Association of Preventive Blindness (IAPB) Eye Health Hero Award in 2017.  

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