AYUSH: Traditional Healthcare In India

Behind the snazzy marketing, there is little clarity on what AYUSH should be doing.

- Vidya Krishnan

On 27 September 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the United Nations General Assembly, he launched into an unexpected digression about yoga. Yoga, he said, “is not about exercise but to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and the nature.” He went on: “By changing our lifestyle and creating consciousness, it can help us deal with climate change.”

The statement made its way to the front pages of most national dailies, with some commentators mocking Modi’s attempt to link yoga and climate change. Nevertheless, in December last year, the UN General Assembly accepted Modi’s call for the adoption of 21 June as International Yoga Day. The event in Delhi to celebrate the occasion, which Modi himself led, set a Guinness World Record for the yoga class with the largest number of participants (35,985) and greatest number of nationalities (84).

It was a moment in the spotlight for the Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy, or AYUSH, upgraded from department status in November 2014, and the focus of many of the new government’s publicity efforts. Founded in 1995 under the Narasimha Rao government, the Department of Indian Medicine and Homeopathy had its name changed to AYUSH in 2003, but nothing in its history before or since was as high profile as International Yoga Day. The event’s scale was in keeping with the increase in funds to AYUSH: the money earmarked for these systems in the two budgets of the present government has increased by about 30 percent from the previous United Progressive Alliance government’s allocation.

This has been accompanied by several bold claims. Last month, for example, the