The Paediatric ophthalmology services in Madurai is unique in providing comprehensive services to all children aged 15 years and below, and is well recognised as one of the best services in the country and Internationally. The clinic is dedicated to the development of special techniques for examining and treating children's eye diseases. The most common childhood eye diseases treated in this clinic are refractive errors, strabismus, amblyopia, congenital cataract, genetic eye diseases and congenital glaucoma. Jointly with the retina services it conducts screening and treatment of premature babies for ROP, and makes all efforts to enhance the residual vision in children with visual impairment by providing either optical or non optical low vision aids. It is also the first centre to initiate the training of school teachers and to provide eye care to school children through the school screening programme apart from screening of children enrolled in Government ICDS centres for eye problems.

Aravind's paediatric service is the only centre in Tamilnadu that started the structured fellowship training in paediatric ophthalmology in the year 1990. It is also well known externally as an institute which gives comprehensive training in all the fields necessary to practice paediatric ophthalmology and is a well demanded subspeciality fellowship programme. Recently Madurai AEH has been nominated as one of the best training institute for ophthalmologists fellowship programme by ORBIS International and has been strengthened in many ways. Towards developing more centres providing quality eye services to children, our team is actively involved in identifying such potential hospitals in the country and helping them in training their human resources which include Ophthalmologist, Orthoptist, Nurses, Counsellors, and community workers. Fellows trained by us are working in atleast 15 such centres and in future more such centres will be developed with the help of ORBIS. Because of the demand from other developing countries we also undertake training the Ophthalmologists, orthoptist and nurses for them. So far the countries for which the doctors trained are Bangladesh (6), Nigeria(2), 1 each from Bhutan, Albania, Gautamala, Czechoslovakia. The paramedical staff trained are from Bangladesh, Tanzania, Nigeria, Bhutan, Nepal and Kenya and in India (around 100 in number.) The department is involved in updating or preparing a new brochure on many common eye diseases in children distributing them to all the newly developed centres through ORBIS.

To enhance the learning process we are in the process of developing manuals on common practices on Paediatric cataract, a reference manual for pediatricians on common eye diseases, Handbook on Orthoptics meant both for Orthoptists and ophthalmologists which has been approved by Government of India for a joint publication whereas the first two are pending approval.

The clinic has conducted several research projects, including the first screening of children (0-6yrs) enrolled in the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) to identify common ocular problems and a hospital-based study to determine the etiology of congenital cataract, Population based cross sectional study to estimate the prevalence of ocular morbidity among children of rural south India, Population based surveillance for Congenital rubella syndrome in south Indian children in collaboration with WHO etc. Also actively involved in basic research and currently doing many projects jointly with the dept of research which include Molecular genetics of Congenital cataract; earlier in collaboration with Germany and now with NEI, projects on Congenital Aniridia, Albinism, Globe(structural ) anomalies, Molecular genetics of Rubella virus approved and funded by ICMR, and Leber’s congenital amaurosis in collaboration with Iowa.