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My answer is 2047. Twenty-one years from now, India completes a century of independence, and our commitment is to arrive there as a developed nation. The question worth asking is: What does Ayurveda contribute to it?

On November 9, 2014, at what is now Bharat Mandapam in Delhi, the Sixth World Ayurveda Congress was closing. I was its Secretary General. The Prime Minister came to give the valedictory address, and the Ministry of Ayush was born that same day. He asked the profession for one thing above everything else. Vishwas. Trust.

Ten Ayurveda Days have passed since. Let us look at what this decade built. It has been extraordinary, and we are not saying it enough.

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It rebuilt the regulator after half a century, and created institutions of a different order across the country: 12,500 Ayushman Arogya Mandirs now deliver Ayush care, serving 12.64 crore people against 5.07 crore in 2021. The sector grew from under $3 billion to over $43 billion. In February 2025, the traditional medicine module of the International Classification of Diseases went live, carrying 1,941 Indian morbidity codes. And at Jamnagar stands a WHO global centre for traditional medicine, one of only four in the world.

That is a decade of building. But architecture is not yet an outcome. A code in the classification is not yet a record in a hospital. A market is not yet evidence. The last 10 years built the frame of the house. The next ten must furnish it.

Consider chocolate. Switzerland does not grow a single cocoa bean. Yet, Swiss chocolate commands a premium everywhere. Not because of advertising. In 1875, Daniel Peter combined milk with chocolate. In 1879, Rodolphe Lindt invented conching, a piece of process engineering that changed texture. Then came standards, then legal protection of the name, and only then the brand. In that order, over decades.


And two years ago, a pistachio chocolate swept the internet. Brilliant product, enormous demand, counterfeited in every market within months, because there was nothing behind the name. A brand without a standard is not a brand. It is a fashion, and a fashion has a season.

Ayurveda has everything Switzerland does not. The raw material, the knowledge, the heritage, the origin. What we lack is what Switzerland has. A standard behind the name that anyone can check. Today, any person in any country can write the word Ayurveda on a jar. The Ayush Mark exists. Whether we make it mean something enforceable and internationally recognised is the question of this decade.


So what does the furnishing consist of? Evidence, in a form a health system can act on, and not only one we find convincing ourselves. Standards, so that a batch made this year and one made next year are the same medicine. Data, so that 12.64 crore visits become 12.64 crore records. And trust, which is not the fourth item on that list. It is the reason for the other three.

Trust has become harder to earn everywhere, and not only for us. In one recent study, people shown real photographs alongside faces generated by artificial intelligence trusted the artificial ones more. Trust no longer follows authority. It does not follow a title, an institution, or a 5,000-year-old tradition. Only what can be checked survives.

There is a reason to do all of this that has nothing to do with exports. Today, Ayurveda is a regulated system of practice, with regulated products, in only a handful of countries. In 10 years, it should be 50. Not present in 50. Regulated in 50. A practitioner licensed, a product registered, a claim permitted, a patient protected.

That is not a trade ambition. It is a question of access. Ayurveda’s strength in global health is that it is affordable, preventive, and works where doctors are few. Most who would benefit live in countries that cannot yet accept it, for want of a standard by which to accept it. Regulation is not the barrier. Regulation is the door.

We inherited this knowledge. Making certain the rest of the world can also use it, safely and with confidence, is our generation’s responsibility.

Students and teachers, choose one problem Ayurveda has not solved, and carry it to the day you graduate. Write it down in the first year. Publish it in the last. Graduate with a problem, and not only a degree.


To researchers, practitioners and manufacturers: Record every patient as though the world will read it, because it will. Report harm as faithfully as benefit. And be the first to correct a claim made in Ayurveda’s name that the evidence will not carry.

And to government, which alone can do this, publish India’s traditional medicine report card every Ayurveda Day. The systems already exist. Connect them, and publish what they say, better or worse than last year.

Success in 2047 will not be measured by how often India says the word Ayurveda. It will be measured by whether prevention, diet, routine and season have become the ordinary way this country stays well. So useful that they become invisible, the way the alphabet is invisible in a sentence.

Ayurveda’s knowledge is shashwatam. What we owe is vishwas. The house is built. Whether we furnish it, or only admire it, is ours to decide.

The writer is Unit Head, Traditional Medicine Research, Data and Innovation, at the WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre, Jamnagar. Views are personal