Tej Kohli

Tej Kohli is a technologist who has committed to using a portion of his wealth to fight needless blindness in the world's poorest communities. Tej Kohli adopted curing needless blindness as his calling nearly two decades ago, when he funded a single corneal transplant for a patient at a hospital in India. A large portion of the 'poverty blindness' that occurs in the world's poorer countries is either avoidable or curable. Seeing the pervasive social and economic impact that blindness has within poor communities, where poverty and blindness are a cause and also a consequence of each other, Tej Kohli became one of the world biggest advocated for universal eye care.

After learning and seeing how easily individual patients could be cured, Tej Kohli committed to funding large-scale grassroots treatment programs. His first large-scale program was the Tej Kohli Cornea Institute in India (TKCI). Between 2015 and 2019 TKCI cured tens of thousands of patients of corneal blindness.

Tej Kohl is also committed to funding new innovations to cure blindness. In 2019 the Tej Kohli Foundation launched the Tej Kohli Cornea Program at Massachusetts Eye And Ear in Boston to fund the development of novel new medical and scientific innovations to be used in the global fight against needless blindness.

Then in early 2021 Tej Kohli partnered with Dr Sanduk Ruit to launch the Tej Kohli And Ruit Foundation, a restricted fund operating under the auspices of Prism the Gift Fund, registered UK charity number 1099682. The Tej Kohli And Ruit Foundation operated microsurgical outreach camps that cure patients of cataract blindness in volume within the world's poor, remote and underserved communities.

Tej Kohli regularly posts and blogs about his fight against needless blindness in his #TejTalks blog.