Modi Government’s efforts to push Ayush through various programmes and schemes are yielding positive results. According to the data tabled in Lok Sabha recently, atleast 17.74 crores patients visited the Ayush healthcare facilities last year, 17.27 crores and 15.94 crores in 2016-17 and 2015-16 respectively.
"The efforts of Central Government for promotion of Ayush through various programmes and schemes yielded in more number of people availing treatment from Ayush health care facilities. However, taking treatment from Allopathy or Ayush is the choice of the people," Union Ayush Minister Shripad Naik said in Lok Sabha in the ongoing session.
The Minister also talked about the progress of its pilot project integrating Ayush with modern medicine to tackle lifestyle related disorders such as diabetes and cancer launched in some districts in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Bihar and Rajasthan.
Of ten lakhs patients screened in the last two years since implementation of the project, 93,117 patients have been enrolled for long term management through ayurveda and yoga interventions.
As Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) like diabetes are difficult to treat and in view of rising health cost, the Government is focussing on bringing convergence and synergy between traditional medicine, modern medicine and modern sciences for scientific validation of ayurveda concepts and development based drugs in collaboration with country’s reputed research institutes like AIIMS, CSIR, DRDO and CCRAS to name a few.
For instance, two labs of CSIR - National Botanical Research Institute (NBRI) and Central Institute for Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (CIAMP) have jointly developed cost-effective anti-diabetes herbal medicine BGR-34. A formulation of herbs like Giloy, Sadabhara, methi and daruheda, the BGR-34 has been found to have effectively manage blood glucose homeostasis in Type 2 Diabetes which is becoming India’s fastest growing disease. AIIMS is conducting carious researches to assess impact of herbs in management of chronic diseases.
From 72 million diabetes cases recorded in 2017, the number is expected to nearly double by 2025. Similarly, by 2040, cancer cases are expected to almost double to twenty lakh compared to 11.6 lakh cases in 2016. The World Health Organisation Report for 2018 says that NCDs account for 63 per cent of deaths in India.