Intro: AYUSH has been neglected for long in India. The Government needs to promote Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy in a big way to produce competent physicians.
In the area of wellness, the central government has spelt out the facts and figures in a very terse manner in its ‘Make in India’ campaign portal. After perusing these figures, one is left wondering why healthcare benefits are not available uniformly throughout the population and why India’s wellness and health parameters do not compare favourably with global standards.
According to published government data of 2013, India has 6,86,319 registered AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy) practitioners and more than 7,00,000 Allopathic practitioners. When we talk of wellness, we refer only to AYUSH, which comprises the traditional systems of medicare like Ayurveda and Yoga. Considering number of medical practitioners in the country, the doctor population ratio works out to be nearly 1:900. This ratio compares very favourably with the conventional doctor to population ratio stated on the basis of the number of Allopathic practitioners, which in the case of India is 1:1700 and is considered below par with reference to World Health Organisation (WHO) prescribed standard of 1:1000.
The above data clearly shows that we have failed to develop our systems of traditional healthcare in the AYUSH segment. Ayurveda is India’s rich heritage and is verily the mother of all other systems of medicine in vogue today. Ayurveda is rooted in Vedas (Rigveda and Atharvaveda) which have divine sources and have served as the beacon of guiding light to humanity ever since mankind first breathed on earth.
We do not have to shy away from the fact that India is still home to the largest population of lepers, tuberculosis afflicted persons and diabetics in the world. Why should this be the case when India is also home to the largest range of medicinal herbs and minerals in the world and is also the land of the divine science of healthcare called Ayurveda?
It seems we have not done that badly in medical education when we consider the fact that we have nearly seven lakh practitioners of AYUSH in India. But problems actually lie elsewhere. The problems lie in lack of education of masses on the fundamentals of healthcare; the standards of AYUSH institutions is very poor and consequent lack of competent practitioners churned out by these institutions and absence of a sound distribution network of quality drugs and pharmaceutical products adds to the poor healthcare in the country.
Today, if you conduct a survey across any section of educated, urban middle class population in India, as many as 80 percent of the population doesn’t display faith in Ayurveda and Ayurvedic practitioners. They take recourse to AYUSH system only when they fail to get relief from Allopathic treatment after thoroughly trying it out.
Therefore, the greatest challenge before the development of AYUSH remains mass education. And for this, the government needs to establish medical colleges and research institutions of high standards. Brilliant students of secondary schools desiring a career in medicine wish to become Allopathic doctors, not Homoeopaths or Ayurvedic physicians (Vaids). The reason is that a career in Allopathic medicine or surgery is perceived to be more lucrative, which is true. The government needs to establish more dispensaries, clinics and hospitals in AYUSH segment and the Ayurvedic physicians should treat as well as guide the patients on preventive healthcare based on the sound principles of Ayurveda. We need to take a look at China where the government has established a traditional Chinese Medicare clinic or hospital alongside every Allopathic clinic or hospital. Our previous governments are singularly responsible for neglecting Ayurveda in the country of its origin and that is the reason why we do not see competent Ayurvedic physicians in the country today. Medical institutions producing Bachelor of Ayurveda, Medicine and Surgery (BAMS) graduates by the thousands is also a joke as these graduates are imparted courses in Ayurveda as well as Allopathy. They end up neither complete Ayurvedic physicians nor competent Allopathic doctors.
AYUSH has the potential to manage and even cure the so called intractable diseases like AIDS, Cancer and Alzheimer’s. Let the sinister commercial games played by the multinational pharmaceutical companies also not come in the way of this. They have, in the past, played a big role in preventing the promotion of AYUSH in the country.
If there is a sector tailor-made for the PPP (Public Private Partnership) model, it is the wellness/healthcare sector where the traditional popular wisdom and government’s resources will find a synergistic confluence. The government must facilitate the creation of JVs and partnership entities in wellness sector by inviting private investment but before that, the sector itself is required to be made more lucrative through quantum increase in quality of medical education and physicians and disseminating the true fundamentals of healthcare.
(The writer is a senior coulumnist)
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