Who Watches Ayurveda?

The Case for an Independent Watchdog — and the Missing Door of Redress

Dr Aakash Kembhavi *Academician, Clinician & Researcher Director, Astanga Wellness Pvt. Ltd. Ayurveda Unfiltered*

A note on intent. What follows is a set of personal reflections and opinions. It is offered in the spirit of reform from within a tradition I have served for more than three decades, and it is not directed at any individual, office, institution, ministry, or authority. Where I speak of “the regulators and authorities that make decisions and policies for Ayurveda,” I mean a structural arrangement, not a set of persons. Nothing here is intended to defame, accuse, or impugn the motives of anyone. The argument is about design, not about people; about an empty chair, not about those who happen to occupy the room.

A note on method. This essay was developed in transparent collaboration with an AI system, which I used as a thinking partner and drafting aid. The ideas, judgements, framing, and final word are my own; the disclosure is a matter of principle, not afterthought.

I. A city full of watchers

When I taught in London in the early years of this century, what struck me was not the architecture of the universities or the gravity of the lecture halls. It was something quieter and more pervasive: the sheer density of watchers woven into the ordinary life of that society.

Almost everything that touched the public had something standing over it, at one remove, asking whether it was being done honestly. Schools were inspected and their reports published for any parent to read. Advertisers could not make a health claim without risking a body that would force them to withdraw it. The medical and pharmacy professions had their licensing authorities — and then, above even those authorities, sat another body whose only task was to watch the watchers and ask whether the regulators themselves were doing their jobs. Public money was audited by an office that answered to Parliament rather than to the government it scrutinised. Consumer organisations tested products and named the failures. Scientists and journalists maintained an informal but ferocious ecosystem that flagged the retracted paper, the manipulated image, the claim that would not replicate.

None of this was comfortable for the watched. Inspection is never comfortable. But the cumulative effect was a society in which a citizen who had been wronged, or a professional who had witnessed wrongdoing, had somewhere to go. There was a door to knock on. And behind the door there was someone whose institutional interest was not served by making the complaint disappear.

I returned to my own discipline and could not stop thinking about the contrast. Ayurveda, in the country of its birth, is governed with remarkable tightness. It is licensed, accredited, examined, pharmacopoeially specified, and increasingly subjected to the language of standards and compliance. By every formal appearance it is a regulated science. And yet, if you are a patient harmed by a malpractised treatment, a student defrauded by an institution that exists more on paper than in practice, a junior researcher pressured to manufacture a result, or an honest practitioner watching the tradition’s name traded away by exaggerated cure-claims — where, exactly, do you go?

For most who ask that question honestly, the answer is the most damning fact in this entire essay: nowhere that is meaningfully independent of the apparatus being complained about.

II. The paradox of regulation without redress

There is a logic to why societies regulate a science at all. We regulate medicine because the stakes are life and death and because the patient cannot independently verify what is being done to them. We regulate the food on the shelf, the drug in the bottle, the bridge over the river, because the asymmetry of knowledge between the expert and the public is so great that trust must be underwritten by something other than the expert’s good word.

But regulation is not merely a set of rules issued downward. Regulation, properly understood, is a contract. In exchange for the privileges of recognition — the licence, the title, the public’s trust, the patient’s body — the regulated party accepts accountability. And accountability is not accountability unless there exists a mechanism by which the governed can hold the governors to account, and by which the harmed can seek redress.

This is the missing element. We have built, around Ayurveda, almost the entire scaffolding of a regulated science. We have curricula and accreditation. We have pharmacopoeial standards and manufacturing norms. We have ethics committees and the vocabulary of pharmacovigilance. We have policies, circulars, undertakings, and compliance frameworks of formidable length.

What we do not have is a door.

There is no readily accessible, independent, credible mechanism through which a patient, a student, a whistle-blower, or an ordinary practitioner can lodge a grievance against the decisions, omissions, or failures of the system itself — and expect that grievance to be heard by someone whose interest is not bound up with protecting the system. The forums that do exist are, almost without exception, internal to the apparatus. To complain is to petition the very body whose conduct is in question, and to hope that it will judge itself against itself.

A tightly regulated science with no avenue of redress is a contradiction. The tightness becomes purely procedural — a great deal of machinery for issuing rules, and no machinery at all for answering the people those rules are meant to protect. Worse, the regulatory tightness can come to serve the opposite of its purpose: it can become an instrument of control over the practitioner and the institution while offering the public nothing it can actually use. Rules that flow only downward, and never permit a grievance to flow back up to an impartial ear, are not the apparatus of a protected public. They are the apparatus of an unaccountable authority.

This is the paradox I want to place at the centre of this essay: the very tightness of Ayurveda’s regulation is what makes the absence of a redressal mechanism so indefensible. A loosely governed folk practice owes the public no door, because it claims no authority over them. But a discipline that insists on its standing as a regulated medical science cannot, in the same breath, deny the public the right of appeal that makes regulation legitimate in the first place.

III. The conflict of interest at the heart of the system

To understand why the door is missing, we must name the structural problem honestly — and we can do so without naming a single institution, because the problem is not any particular body but the fusion of functions that runs through the whole arrangement.

In a healthy regulatory ecosystem, three roles are kept apart. There is the promoter, whose job is to advance and grow the discipline. There is the regulator, whose job is to set and enforce standards. And there is the scrutineer — the watchdog — whose job is to stand outside both and ask, on the public’s behalf, whether the first two are doing their work honestly. These roles pull in different directions by design, and the friction between them is the whole point. A promoter wants growth; a scrutineer is willing to say the growth is hollow. Keep them separate and they check each other.

In the governance of Ayurveda, these roles are not separate. The bodies and authorities that make decisions and set policy are, very often, simultaneously the champions of the sector, the regulators of the sector, and the judges of complaints against the sector. The same hands that are charged with making Ayurveda flourish are also the hands to which one must appeal when Ayurveda has failed someone.

This is not a charge of bad faith against anyone. It is simply an observation about incentives. A body whose mandate, success, and very reason for existence are tied to the growth and good name of a sector cannot also be the impartial authority that tells the public, plainly and publicly, when that sector has harmed them. The conflict is structural and it would defeat even the most honourable people placed within it. You cannot ask an institution to be both the proud parent and the impartial examiner of the same child.

This fusion is precisely why the door of redress is missing. The door cannot be built inside the house, because everyone inside the house has an interest in where it leads. It has to be built outside — and that is what a watchdog is.

IV. What a watchdog is, and what it is not

The word “watchdog” is loose, and the looseness has sunk many a well-meaning proposal. So let me be precise.

A regulator sits inside the system it governs. It licenses, inspects, accredits, and sanctions. It is the system’s own instrument of control.

A watchdog sits outside the system and watches it — including, crucially, watching the regulators themselves. Its independence from the apparatus it monitors is not incidental to its function; it is its function. A watchdog that is funded by, appointed by, or answerable to the body it is meant to scrutinise is not a watchdog. It is a department.

The distinction matters enormously for our case, because Ayurveda’s problem is emphatically not a shortage of governing bodies. We have an abundance of them. We are among the most institutionally dense traditional medical systems in the world. To propose “more oversight” would be to misdiagnose the disease. The disease is not too little governance; it is governance with no independent eye upon it and no door of redress for those it governs.

So the proposal of this essay is narrow and, I hope, therefore harder to dismiss. I am not calling for another regulator. I am calling for the one institution we conspicuously lack: an independent watchdog, structurally separate from the authorities that promote and regulate Ayurveda, whose task is to watch the system on the public’s behalf and to provide the door of redress that the system itself cannot honestly provide.

V. What such a watchdog would watch

If the function is to scrutinise the discipline on behalf of the public, the domains of scrutiny organise naturally into five.

Education integrity. Whether colleges exist in substance and not merely on paper; whether faculty are real and present; whether teaching and examination meet the standards claimed for them; whether the gap between documented compliance and lived reality is being quietly tolerated. A watchdog’s published, comparable reports on institutions would do for Ayurveda education what independent inspection does elsewhere — create a public record that cannot be buried by the body that issued the accreditation.

Research integrity. Whether published claims are sound or manufactured; whether predatory publication, ghost authorship, and unreplicable results are being passed off as evidence; whether the language of science is being used to launder its opposite. This is the domain in which a watchdog overlaps with the global culture of post-publication scrutiny — the willingness to ask, in public, whether a result is real.

Clinical and advertising claims. Whether the public is being promised what cannot be delivered. The exaggerated cure-claims — for conditions where no such cure exists — do more lasting damage to Ayurveda’s credibility than any external critic could ever inflict. A watchdog with the standing to call out a false claim protects the tradition from its own worst salesmen.

Drug safety and honest pharmacovigilance. Whether genuine safety signals — questions of heavy-metal content, adulteration, contamination, manufacturing quality, organ toxicity — are met with honest investigation or with defensive denial. A discipline confident in its remedies should be the first to want them tested, not the last.

Public communication and conflicts of interest. Both the machinery of hype and the machinery of hostility; the undeclared interest; the capture of a decision by those it enriches. The watchdog’s interest here is simply the truth of the public conversation about Ayurveda, in both directions.

In every one of these domains, the watchdog’s real product is the same: a published, independent, credible record — and, behind it, a door through which the harmed and the concerned can bring what they know.

VI. Three ways to build it

There is more than one way to construct such a body, and an honest essay should set out the menu rather than assert a single answer.

The statutory model would create the watchdog by law, giving it formal powers of investigation and the authority to compel. Its strength is teeth. Its weakness is that a body created by authority can be neutered, starved, or captured by authority — and a watchdog that depends for its existence on the goodwill of those it watches is a watchdog in name only. It is also the slowest road, and the one most likely to die in the building.

The self-regulatory model would have the sector fund the watchdog through a levy while surrendering its governance to genuinely independent hands. It is faster and can be made credible. Its vulnerability is the obvious charge that the sector is marking its own homework — a charge that can only be answered by absolute transparency about who governs the body and how.

The civil-society model would establish an independent, transparently funded standing observatory — scholars, clinicians, methodologists, an ethicist, a legal mind, patient representatives, and, deliberately, at least one credible and informed critic of the tradition. It would hold no statutory power to compel. Its only instruments would be investigation, publication, and the moral authority of a record kept honestly in public. Its weakness is that it cannot force anyone to do anything. Its strength is that it owes nothing to anyone, and it can begin tomorrow.

My own view, offered as opinion and not as decree, is that the civil-society watchdog is the realistic place to begin. Statutory recognition is the right long-term aspiration, but it is an aspiration; the observatory is something that those of us who care about the tradition could actually bring into being rather than merely demand. And a watchdog that exists, however modest, is worth infinitely more than a perfect one that is forever proposed.

VII. Design principles — and the oldest question

Whatever the model, certain features are non-negotiable, because each closes a door through which capture or self-protection could enter.

Its funding must be independent and disclosed in full. Its members must serve fixed terms, so that no one becomes entrenched and comfortable. Every interest every member holds must be declared and public. A credible sceptic must be built into its composition by design, not tolerated grudgingly, because a watchdog composed only of the faithful is merely the faith with better stationery. And its processes — how a grievance is received, how it is investigated, how a finding is reached and published — must be transparent enough that the public can see the machinery working.

Above all, it must answer, in its founding charter, the oldest question that can be put to any guardian: quis custodiet ipsos custodes — who watches the watchman? A watchdog that exempts itself from its own standards is dead on arrival, and rightly so. It must publish its own accounts, submit to external review of its own conduct, and provide a route of appeal against itself. The moment it claims the immunity it was built to deny others, it has become the very thing it was created to watch.

VIII. The objections, answered honestly

A serious proposal must meet its strongest objections inside its own pages, not leave them for its critics.

It will become a weapon for Ayurveda’s enemies. This is the fear I hear most, and I understand it. But the logic is exactly backwards. The exaggerated claim, the buried safety signal, the diploma mill — these are the gifts we hand our critics. An independent watchdog that addressed them honestly would remove the ammunition, not supply it. A tradition is made vulnerable by what it hides, not by what it is willing to examine.

It will stifle legitimate practice. It need not, if its mandate is scrutiny and redress rather than licensing. It would not add a single rule to the practitioner’s burden. It would add an ear for the practitioner’s own grievances — which at present has no home either.

It could be captured. Yes — which is why the design principles above exist, and why the civil-society model, owing nothing to the apparatus, is the most resistant to capture of the three.

It duplicates bodies that already exist. It does the opposite. The existing bodies promote and regulate. None of them, by their nature, can independently watch the system or hold the door of redress, because they are the system. The watchdog fills a vacuum, it does not crowd a room.

IX. A modest first step

None of this requires waiting for a law. A first version could begin within a year, with no power to compel and no statutory standing at all. It could constitute itself transparently, publish its charter and its members’ interests, open a single honest channel through which grievances and concerns could be received, and commit to investigating and publishing a small number of cases with rigour and fairness. It could issue one annual report. That is all. And that alone — a credible door, and one honest record — would be more than Ayurveda’s public has ever been offered.

The first report would not need to be comprehensive. It would only need to be true. Truth, kept in public and unafraid of itself, has a way of compelling what no statute can.

X. The unfrightened tradition

I began in London, in a society so dense with watchers that I took years to understand what I was seeing. What I was seeing was not suspicion. It was confidence — the confidence of institutions secure enough to be examined, and of a public that knew it had somewhere to turn.

I want that confidence for Ayurveda. I want it not because the tradition is weak, but because I believe it is strong enough to bear scrutiny and be vindicated by it. A discipline that fears an independent eye is telling you something about its own estimate of itself. A discipline that welcomes one is telling you the opposite.

We have built almost the whole house of a regulated science. We have left out only the door — the door through which the harmed may enter and be heard, and through which the public may see that someone, somewhere, is watching on its behalf and answerable to no one whose interest is served by silence.

It is time we built the door. And then we should ask ourselves, honestly, why a tradition so confident in its own worth should ever have been afraid of it.

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