Dr. Sanduk Ruit, born on September 4, 1954 at Olangchung Gola, a rural municipality in the Himalayas of Taplejung District in Nepal is an opthalmologist (eye surgeon) who has restored the sight/vision of over 1,30,000 people across Asia and Africa.

Raised in a very hard-time, Dr. Ruit in his childhood days had the closest school with a week's walk away and there was no health care. His sister's sad death of tuberculosis when he was 17, a preventable and treatable disease, motivated him to become a doctor.

Ruit is founding member the Tilganga Institute of Ophthalmology, it provides free treatment to those who are financially backward. It also manufactures high-quality intraocular lenses for surgery, which is just fraction of the price of its previous production cost. The extremely low cost of these lenses have made quality cataract surgeries affordable to the poorest population around the world.

While Dr. Ruit was working on the Nepal Blindness Survey in the 80s, he met a bold and straight-talking Aussie ophthalmologist called Fred Hollows. They became friends quickly and Fred soon also became his mentor. Over many nights drinking and talking about the world problem, both men quickly realised they shared the common vision: to bring affordable eye care and modern cataract surgery to people in 1987-88, Dr.Ruit came to Australia to live and train with Fred. At that time, intraocular lenses were thought to be too expensive, risk and difficult for treating cataract blindness in developing countries. But Dr Ruit and Fred wanted to change this and they did it.

Ruit was awarded the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for his work in Peace and International Understanding.It is considered to be the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for placing Nepal at the forefront of developing safe, effective, and economical procedures for cataract surgery, enabling the needlessly blind in even the poorest countries to see the world again,

In 2018, the Government of India awarded him with the Padma Shri, its fourth highest civilian award, for his innovation in the 1980s which led to a 90 percent reduction in the cost of cataract eye surgery. His cataract surgery lenses are provided  to over thirty countries at very low cost.

Inspired by his altruistic journey of innovative contribution, a biography The Barefoot Surgeon authored by Australian writer All Gripper, was published in June 2018. This biography's Nepali translation version 'Sanduk Ruit' is released on September, 2019.