Lok Capital, one of the largest dedicated funds in India for businesses focused on serving the BOP (bottom of the pyramid), has made its maiden entry in the healthcare space with a fund infusion into Drishti, a social enterprise providing eye care to under-served populations. The details of the funding are not disclosed.

Drishti will use the funds to service under-served geographies of Karnataka with their three-tier hub and spoke model using outreach programmes for villages, telemedicine supported vision centres at small towns for primary eye care and advanced eye facilities and surgical care at their hospital.

While 80 per cent of people above 50 years require some form of eye care, India has not much providers of eye care in semi-urban or rural areas where the bulk of its population lives. An estimated 12 million people in India are blind, 80 per cent of which is avoidable blindness from cataract, solvable by a simple surgery. Drishti reaches these areas using innovative vision centres set up at existing general physician facilities in small towns and serviced over tele-medicine from its hospital. Services are priced to support all economic segments especially the BOP and include support for social insurance schemes from the government.

“Right now, quality eye care is an imperative in smaller towns and villages, where several people lose sight owing to inadequate treatment. We need to address this across all strata of the socio economic pyramid, but the poor need more attention in terms of access, cost and other critical considerations like loss of livelihood. This is what Drishti aims to do. We reached out to social impact investors via the Ennovent Impact circle and welcome Lok’s investment as an endorsement of our social goals. The funds will help us reach out to more people in these areas,” said Kiran Anandampillai, founder, Drishti.

Speaking on the investment, Vishal Mehta, co-founder, Lok Advisory Services, said, “When it comes to BoP, healthcare is an area which needs immediate intervention, not only in providing affordable treatment, but in providing access to quality facilities. Drishti combines geographic access for such underserved population along with low cost options to the poor. The eye care provider’s operating model ensures that there is minimum dependency on asset creation such as setting up clinics or manning them with trained ophthalmologists.”

With a corpus of US$ 85 million, Lok Capital had earlier invested in enterprises focused on livelihood generation and rural education like Rural Shores, a BPO focused on rural employment and Hippocampus Learning Centre, a rural education initiative. Lok Capital has also funded Vistaar, a small enterprise financing company as well as other financial inclusion players like Ujjivan and IFMR Rural Channels.