Ministry of Ayush
government ministry for traditional and alternative medicine
The Ministry of Ayush is a ministry of the Government of India, responsible for education, research, and propagation of traditional and alternative medicine systems in India. Ayush is an acronym devised from the names of the alternative healthcare systems covered by the ministry: ayurveda, yoga and naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and homeopathy.
The Department of Indian Systems of Medicine and Homeopathy (ISM&H) was first established in 1995 under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare by the then Narasimha Rao government. ISM&H was renamed as the Department of AYUSH in 2003. The department was made into an official ministry in 2014.
The ministry has been accused of promoting pseudoscience as most of the practices regulated are pseudoscientific. It has faced significant criticism for funding systems that lack biological plausibility and are either untested or conclusively proven as ineffective. Quality of research has been poor, and drugs have been launched without rigorous pharmacological studies and meaningful clinical trials on ayurveda or other alternative healthcare systems.
History
Emphasis on indigenous healthcare models
Successive Five-Year Plans of India (produced by the Planning Commission of India) allotted considerable focus to alternative, especially indigenous, forms of medicine within the healthcare sector. The Government of India set up a number of committees for healthcare sector development, including Bhore (1946), Mudaliar (1961), and Srivastava (1975), that emphasized the need for improvement of traditional systems of Indian medicine.
“Ministry of Ayush” enters the record as government ministry for traditional and alternative medicine. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ministry, Ayush and government can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5260158. VIAF identifies the subject as 138587244. The Library of Congress control number is n2005204801. None of the 4 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995, 2003, 2014 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ministry of Ayush” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.