Traditional drugs ignored: PM

Haridwar, May 3: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday rued that successive governments had sought to forget India’s traditional medicinal systems instead of promoting them.

Little was done to promote the traditional systems of medicine and wellness disciplines such as yoga in the pre-and post-independence eras, Modi said after inaugurating a research institute at yoga guru Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Yogpeeth here.

“In the pre-independence era the gems of our traditional systems of medicine and healthcare were deliberately kept under wraps because we were a slave country. But even in the post-independence era, unfortunately, there was an effort on the part of successive governments to forget the distinctive specialities of our traditional systems rather than promoting them,” Modi said.

He said the new institute, designed to facilitate clinical trials and modern packaging of ayurvedic medicines, was a big step forward towards “holistic” healthcare and would pave the way for a wider acceptance of India’s traditional therapeutic systems.

“The main roadblock in the wider acceptance of ayurvedic medicines is the old-school, elaborate system of administering them. If ayurvedic medicines are packaged in a modern way, the world will accept them,” he said. With the hi-tech research institute equipped with a state-of-the-art laboratory, “a significant step” had been taken in that direction, Modi said.

He congratulated Ram dev for the research institute and for taking yoga “to every household acr oss the world”. Modi also released an encyclopaedia compiled by Ramdev’s aide, Acharya Balkrishna.

Titled “World Herbal Encyclopaedia”, it covers over 70,000 herbal species found across the country.