The landscape of Ayurveda education in India: Current status and prospects.

Abstract

India has a well established and regulated traditional medicine system conducting undergraduate (UG), postgraduate (PG) and PhD courses. It has the highest network of colleges across the country among Ayush systems. In view of the growing demand for traditional and complementary medicine services at the global and national level, the need for regulatory and monitoring standards for quality assurance in education and training is pivotal. We aimed to determine the current status of Ayurveda education in India and its prospects. There are 450 UG Ayurveda colleges with 31 790 seats, whereas, 140 institutes are imparting PG Ayurveda courses with 4600 seats. There were many issues that existed in Ayurveda education and practice for a long time. Government of India has taken several initiatives to address these. These include skewed distribution of colleges across the States/Union territoies, less availability of seats in the public sector, gaps in clinical teaching methods, utilization of various available resources and non-availability of a streamlined National online register for Ayurveda practitioners, which needs to be addressed by the National Commission for Indian System of Medicine (NCISM). NCISM has to maintain the recent reforms and needs to operationalise the mandated reforms in a mission and time-bound manner to meet the current public healthcare requirements expected from the Ayurveda system. The roles and responsibilities of other stakeholder institutions, such as Ministry of Education, National Institution for Transformation of India Aayog, Universities and Research Councils, are also vital.