His government now aims to make India a prime destination for international patients seeking alternative therapies –with the help of the World Health Organization and a new visa category.

“We are committed to making India a global medical value hub by further strengthening our traditional medicine industry,” health minister Mansukh Mandaviya said in mid-May.

About a month earlier, Modi and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, visited Jamnagar in the prime minister’s home state of Gujarat to lay the foundation stone for a WHO global centre for traditional medicine.

Backed by a US$250 million investment from the Indian government, the centre is expected to open in 2024 as the first facility of its kind.

While traditional medicine has its fair share of sceptics and critics, the centre will strive to harness the potential of such treatments using modern science and technology, and to improve global health in general.

The centre will focus “on data, innovation and sustainability and will optimise the use of traditional medicine,” Ghebreyesus said at the ceremony.

In a separate statement, WHO said the Jamnagar centre “will concentrate on building a solid evidence base for policies and standards on traditional medicine practices and products, and help countries integrate it as appropriate into their health systems and regulate its quality and safety for optimal and sustainable impact.”

The project dovetails with the Modi government’s near decade promoting India’s own traditional treatments.

The year he became prime minister, Modi established a new ministry called Ayush.

The name is an acronym for five traditional and complementary systems of medicine: Ayurveda, which covers mainly plant-based medicines; yoga and naturopathy, focused on achieving harmony between mind, body and spirit; Unani and Siddha, both holistic styles of treatment; and homeopathy, which is based on the theory of treating “like with like,” whereby substances that cause symptoms can also help cure them.

In his latest move to promote these practices, Modi announced in April that India would “very soon” introduce a special Ayush visa category.

This will allow foreign nationals to travel to the country for traditional treatment. “The possibilities of investment and innovation in the field of Ayush are limitless,” he said, claiming the sector within the country had grown to be worth over US$18 billion from less than US$3 billion before 2014.

Modi also said India will develop an Ayush mark to certify export-quality products and tap overseas markets.

Detractors, many within India itself, argue that traditional
medicine is at best unproven and at worst a sham. When government officials suggested Ayurveda-based treatments for mild Covid-19 in 2020, the Indian Medical Association said they were “inflicting a fraud on the nation and gullible patients by calling placebos as drugs,” the journal Science reported.

But WHO is evidently not discounting traditional medicine entirely. It says that around 80% of the global population is estimated to use some form of traditional medicine, across 170 of its 194 member states. WHO said these governments asked for its support in creating a body of reliable evidence and data on such practices and products.

Bhaskar Bhatt, former president of the Homeopathic Medical Association of India, told Nikkei Asia that all traditional systems under Ayush have been well developed and practiced in India for centuries.

The country’s practitioners, he added, have “great expertise” in Ayurveda, homeopathy and naturopathy, and the world can learn a great deal from them.

Bhatt is hopeful the Ayush visa will become operational in the current fiscal year. “People from the Arab countries, including the UAE, and Africa have already been coming for these traditional medicine services, but they have been visiting on tourist visas,” he said. With the new visa, he explained, they may be able to prolong their stays based on the treatment they require.

He said the creation of the visa will promote Ayush and tourism while helping traditional practitioners.

Asked about criticism of alternative medicine, Bhatt said “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

“When people around the world see that those coming to India for treatment are getting better,” they will be assured that negative perceptions of traditional medicine are “wrong,” he said.

Still, Mayank, a medical student from India’s northern Uttar Pradesh state who preferred to give only his first name, was not optimistic about traditional therapies gaining wider acceptance.

“I switched to studying allopathy after spending three years learning Ayurveda,” he said, referring to treatment of medical conditions by modern means, including drugs, surgery and radiation.

“In Ayurveda, there is little scope for surgeries and invasive procedures,” Mayank told Nikkei. “You can opt for it as a preventive measure to improve your lifestyle, but it is only allopathy which works in the case of a health emergency requiring immediate attention.”

Archana Jyoti, a health columnist in New Delhi, said there are “excellent streams” of medication in the alternative medicine system, which can complement each other instead of competing. But she argued that the government will have to do more to build confidence.

“Since we do not have robust research and clinical trials, and the accountability factor is also missing at times, this makes (traditional medicine) somewhat doubtful to the common masses,” she told Nikkei. “So, the government must work on these issues and strengthen research.”