Aneka Sarkar, who got back her eyesight, after the operation in the Raiganj hospital on Friday (picture by Nantu Dey) and (below) Karunamayee Bhattacharya, who donated the cornea, at her house before her death

Raiganj, Jan. 23: The cornea of a 78-year-old woman, who died yesterday, helped restore the left eyesight of a Class IX student in Raiganj today.

“This is the first cornea transplantation in north Bengal,” said S.S. Sahoo, the chief medical officer of health in North Dinajpur.

Karunamayee Bhattacharya, a resident of Pubipara here, died yesterday afternoon. Her son Jayanta said she had pledged her body for medical study in 1996.

Dr Anjan Kumar Mukherjee, the head of cornea transplantation team at the eye bank in the Raganj district hospital, said they had come to know about the woman’s pledge only yesterday.

“Soon, we got in touch with the blindness control societies in North Dinajpur and the adjoining districts. By midnight, 24 people reported to the eye bank. Tests were conducted on all of them,” the doctor said. “Finally, the Class IX student of Badorpur High School, Aneka Sarkar, whose left eye had been damaged because of pox at an early age, was found suitable for the transplantation.” The girl’s father, a resident of Kushmandi block in South Dinajpur, is a peasant.

The operation, the first in the hospital after the eye bank was set up in March, took three hours, the doctor said.

“After my mother died, civil defence minister Srikumar Mukherjee came to our house and requested us to donate her eye. We are proud that my mother’s eye helped a girl get back her vision,” Jayanata Bhattacharya, a doctor, said.

The minister, who is also the chairman of the North Dinajpur Eye Bank and Blind Welfare Society, said the eye bank had been installed about a year ago at a cost of Rs 35 lakh. “But since we did not get any donors, we could not carry out a single eye transplantation. We are happy that the first surgery was successful.”

Mukherjee said a campaign urging people to donate their eyes after death would be launched soon. He, however, regretted that the district administration and the health department were not taking much initiative to convince people of the necessity of making pledges for donating their eyes after death.

District magistrate Sukumar Bhattacharyya said he would ask the health department to conduct a drive.