Heal the system

Hurdles in practising Ayurveda are limiting its potential to help India improve healthcare access

- TARAN DEOL

INDIA'S TRADITIONAL systems of medicine have seen increased focus in the last decade. The country currently relies on the practitioners of these systems, dubbed AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga, Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Homeopathy and Sowa Rigpa), to improve healthcare coverage.

Last July, Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Bharati Pravin Pawar, announced in the Rajya Sabha that the country had reached a doctor-population ratio of 1:834, which is better than the World Health Organization (WHO)'s recommended ratio of 1:1,000. This ratio, said Pawar, was achieved by "assuming 80 per cent availability of registered allopathic doctors [a total of 1.3 million] and 565,000 AYUSH doctors" in the country.

If one were to only consider 80 per cent availability of the 1.3 million allopathic doctors for a population of 1.24 billion (as per Census 2011), the doctor-patient ratio would translate to 1:1,194, notes a December 2022 article in The Print.

Even as the Centre bets big on AYUSH practitioners-a majority of whom practise Ayurveda-the system currently in place in the country only raises concerns, particularly on the quality of education offered.

QUESTION OF STANDARD

Dedicated Ayurveda colleges in India have been on a rise, from 35 colleges in the 1940s to 453 colleges as of May 2022, says data with the National Commission for Indian System of Medicine (NCISM) under the Union AYUSH ministry. Of these, 352 institutes are private. However, these colleges are currently set up via a procedure that even the government has repeatedly questioned over the last two decades.