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Ayurveda Day, Eleven Years On: Whom Are We Actually Celebrating For?

*MD (Ayu-Shalya), PGDMLS, MS (Counseling & Psychotherapy) Academician, Clinician & Researcher Chief Editor, International Journal of Ayurveda*

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the author’s personal opinions and do not represent the position of any institution, journal, or organisation he is affiliated with. This article is not medical advice and should not be construed as such. In the interest of transparency and honesty, the author discloses that this article was developed in collaboration with AI tools for research, structuring, and drafting; the underlying idea, arguments, and final views and conclusions expressed here remain entirely the author’s own.

It is the eleventh Ayurveda Day. Eleven years of pledges, posters, processions, quizzes, reels, photography contests, and camps.

Eleven years of the same congratulatory loop on the same government portals, the same college WhatsApp groups forwarding the same certificate templates, the same hashtags trending for a day and vanishing by evening.

And so, on this eleventh anniversary, it seems only fair to ask the question that almost nobody in the room wants to ask out loud: what, precisely, have we built?

This is not an attack on any individual college, student, or organiser.

Many of the people running these programmes are sincere, overworked, and doing the best they can within a template handed down to them from above.

The critique here is aimed at the system that has normalised this template as “Ayurveda Day” itself — a system that has quietly substituted the appearance of engagement for the substance of it, year after year, without anyone in a position of authority pausing to ask whether it is working.

The Anatomy of a Ritual

Look at what actually happens on the 23rd of September across the country.

An online pledge is taken. A certificate, auto-generated and largely unverified, is downloaded and shared.

A seminar is held — usually indoors, usually for the same students who attend every seminar, usually chaired by the same senior faculty who chair every seminar.

A reel-making competition is announced, judged loosely on views and likes rather than on any coherent understanding of Ayurveda communicated.

A quiz tests recall of textbook trivia.

A photography competition rewards the most aesthetically pleasing image of a herb, a temple, or a smiling patient.

A procession winds through a town for an hour, banners aloft, watched mostly by people waiting for the traffic to clear.

Each of these, taken alone, is a modest and forgivable activity. Taken together, year after year, as the sum total of what an entire system of medicine does to mark its own national day, they add up to something else: a ritual of self-congratulation that is almost entirely internal.

Students perform for faculty.

Faculty perform for administrators.

Administrators perform for the ministry.

The ministry, in turn, performs for the public via a portal nobody outside our own fraternity ever visits.

The audience for Ayurveda Day, in other words, is Ayurveda itself.

Do the Camps and Processions Actually Move the Needle?

The free medical camp deserves particular scrutiny, because it is usually held up as the one activity with genuine social contact.

A camp is set up, often in a rural or underserved area, and free consultations and medicines are dispensed for a day.

It photographs well.

It generates goodwill.

It ticks the “outreach” box in every annual report.

But ask the uncomfortable follow-up questions.

  • Is there any follow-up with the patients seen that day — a week later, a month later?
  • Is there a referral pathway for anything the camp uncovers that a single consultation cannot resolve?
  • Are the medicines dispensed rationally prescribed and adequately explained, or handed out in a queue moving too fast for real clinical judgement?
  • Does the camp build any lasting relationship with that community, or does it descend once a year, distribute goodwill and free tablets, and disappear until the next Ayurveda Day?

A single day of free medicine, with no continuity of care, no documentation that survives the event, and no measurable outcome, is not a public health intervention.

It is a gesture. Gestures matter for morale; they do not substitute for systems.

The awareness procession invites the same scrutiny.

Awareness of what, exactly? That Ayurveda exists?

Most of India already knows Ayurveda exists — it has known for millennia.

The problem was never that awareness of Ayurveda’s existence is too low.

**The problem is that awareness of what Ayurveda can and cannot do, awareness of where to find a competently trained physician, awareness of the standards a BAMS-qualified doctor is actually held to — all of that remains close to zero, procession after procession. **

A banner walked through a marketplace does nothing to close that gap.

If anything, by substituting spectacle for substance, it may widen it, because the public is left with an impression of festivity rather than any clearer understanding of the discipline.

The Global Mirror

It would be convenient to treat this as a uniquely Indian failing, born of bureaucratic box-ticking.

It is not. Ayurveda communities in the diaspora — in the United Kingdom, in continental Europe, in North America, in parts of Southeast Asia — mark the same day with a strikingly similar menu: webinars, certificates, social media challenges, the occasional wellness expo.

The packaging changes with the geography; the underlying logic does not.

Everywhere, Ayurveda Day has become an occasion for visibility rather than an occasion for accountability.

This is worth naming precisely because it suggests the problem is not local mismanagement but a shared, almost reflexive, habit across the entire field: when a system is unsure of how to demonstrate its worth, it defaults to spectacle.

The Questions We Consistently Avoid

None of the activities described above touch the three areas where Ayurveda’s credibility is actually being decided, quietly, every single day, whether or not anyone is watching: education, clinical competence, and research.

Education:

  • What is the real state of teaching in the majority of BAMS colleges once the Ayurveda Day banners come down?
  • How many colleges can honestly claim that their students graduate with sound diagnostic reasoning, safe prescribing habits, and the clinical exposure the curriculum assumes they have had?
  • Where is the annual, public, institution-wise reckoning of this — not a press release, an actual audit?

Clinical skill:

  • How many recent BAMS graduates can independently manage a genuine clinical emergency, take a competent surgical history, or recognise when a case is beyond their scope and needs referral?
  • Is this measured anywhere with the same seriousness that a reel-making competition is judged?

Research:

  • How much of what gets published under the Ayurveda banner each year would survive a rigorous, adversarial peer review conducted by reviewers with no institutional stake in the outcome?
  • How many of our own journals — mine included — can say with confidence that quality, not quantity or goodwill, drives what gets accepted?

These are not new questions. They have been asked, in one form or another, by serious voices inside the field for decades.

What is striking is how completely they are absent from the official calendar of Ayurveda Day itself.

We have built an entire national commemoration around the discipline without building a single recurring, public forum where these three questions are actually discussed — openly, with dissent permitted, with data on the table, and without the discussion being managed into a predetermined, flattering conclusion.

Where Is the Room for Disagreement?

This absence is the deepest failure of all.

A living discipline needs a place

  • where its own practitioners can disagree with each other in public,
  • where a junior scholar can question a senior professor’s teaching without fear of professional consequence,
  • where a journal editor can publish a critical audit of an entrance examination without being accused of “defaming Ayurveda,”
  • where a clinician can say plainly that a particular formulation lacks evidence without being cast as an enemy of tradition.

Every mature field of knowledge has such spaces — contentious conferences, open letters, adversarial review, public retractions.

Ayurveda’s institutional calendar, Ayurveda Day very much included, has almost none of this.

What it has instead is a single annual occasion for unanimous applause.

An honest platform for open discussion would not need banners or reels.

It would need a willingness, from those who currently control the microphones — college principals, journal editors, regulatory bodies, senior academicians — to hand a portion of that microphone to people who will use it to ask hard questions rather than to say thank you.

That willingness has been in short supply.

It is far easier, and far less risky to one’s own position, to organise a quiz.

The Exceptions Worth Naming

  • It would be dishonest to end this without acknowledging that exceptions exist, and that they matter.
  • There are colleges that use this day to launch genuine community health screening programmes with real follow-up.
  • There are individual teachers who use it to run honest, self-critical discussions with their own students about where the curriculum is failing them.
  • There are researchers who quietly publish uncomfortable audits, of examinations, of curricula, of clinical outcomes, without waiting for a national day to give them permission.

These exceptions are precisely the model the rest of the field should be studying and scaling — not because they photograph as well as a procession, but because they are the only activities on this list that leave something behind once the day is over.

What Would Actually Count as Progress

If Ayurveda Day is to mean more than it currently does, the test should not be how many certificates were downloaded or how many reels crossed a view count.

The test should be simpler and harder: did anything happen this year that will still be measurably true a year from now?

  • A published, institution-wise audit of clinical training quality.
  • A public repository of research retractions and corrections, owned rather than buried.
  • A standing, moderated forum — physical or digital, it does not matter which — where criticism of the system is treated as an act of loyalty to it rather than betrayal.
  • A single camp that returns to the same community on a fixed schedule rather than once a year for the photograph.

None of this is beyond the field’s resources.

It is well within them.

What has been missing is not capacity but the willingness to be judged by outcomes that cannot be captured in a certificate template.

Eleven years is long enough to have learned this.

The twelfth Ayurveda Day is an opportunity, still open, to do something other than repeat the eleventh.

Because perhaps keeping Ayurveda alive does not mean protecting it from uncomfortable questions.

Perhaps it means having the courage to ask them.

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