I believe this is the only university in the country with the focused mandate of bridging Indian Shastras and Western Sciences. We will develop this University into an IIT class of an Institution for the traditional Health Sciences of India….”

— Sam Pitroda, Advisor to the Prime Minister on Innovation

Among the few good decisions made by the decrepit and discredited BJP government last year, before it plunged into the election process, was to clear the proposal by Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT) to set up a health university in Bangalore. The university, named the Institute for Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology (IHST), will be launched on Sunday. It’s heritage with science, not mumbo jumbo.

FRLHT, near Yelahanka, has been around in Bangalore for a long time — 20 years. Founded as a trust in 1993 by inventor and innovator Sam Pitroda and Darshan Shankar, FRLHT’s declared mission was the “Application of traditional knowledge blended with modern science and technology to design healthcare solutions that are low-cost, safe, effective and accessible to rural and urban populations in India and globally.” The new university itself has two clear purposes: One, it is for “lowering costs and enhancing access, quality and reach of healthcare to millions,” and two, to “facilitate creation of transformative knowledge and original Indian contributions, to the world of medicine and life sciences.”

What is interesting, and indeed ironical, is that in the midst of all the chicaneries that our netas across political parties are engaged in to scuttle the implementation of the Madhav Gadgil committee recommendations on the Western Ghats, or the modified Kasturirangan panel version of it, these two pioneers chose Bangalore to set up the venture because of its proximity to the ghats. The city is situated so that it provides the best access to both the Western and Eastern Ghats, which are rich in medicinal plants.

Just to remind readers, some netas and sundry entrepreneurs have been severely distressed in peninsular India ever since UNESCO inscribed 39 serial sites in the Western Ghats on the World Heritage List in recognition of their bio-diversity and natural habitat values. The heritage status, alongside the Gadgil committee recommendations, had seemingly put paid to their ‘development’ project proposals in the ghats. Their hopes are now revived since Very-Moving Veerappa Moily has taken over the Union environment portfolio and has begun to approve doubtful proposals at dizzying speed. The good minister, perhaps, should meditate on them through a weekend at Kedarnath. It’s all very quiet over there.

Pitroda and Shankar, and their team of unheralded, quiet and studious professionals, are moved by completely different concerns. They believe that the Indian knowledge systems could have “contemporary relevance” and lament that “post colonial India has forgotten its own heritage.” They are working with the belief that along with the rigour of modern methods and applications standards of medicinal research, if investments could be made in the modernisation of Indian systems of medicine, there could be big dividends in terms of “low cost solutions for millions in primary health care.” To achieve this, they seek the “conservation of medicinal flora, fauna, metal and minerals.”

The field of study is broad and inclusive. They take in “the village-based prakrit stream with one million community-supported healers (birth attendants, bonesetter, herbal healers),” as well as “the town-based samskrit stream with 400,000 licensed physicians.” The database at FRLHT includes 6,560 medicinal plants, 200,000 herbal formulations and 100,000 medical manuscripts. All this to “construct a new Indian model of integrative healthcare for the 21st century.” The database cross-references local systems of medicine and ingredients in several Indian languages and compares them with modern pharmacopeia.

The foundation’s work has been recognised elsewhere in India and abroad. The modest 17-acre campus in north Bangalore has research laboratories and a 100-bed research hospital with over 150 professionals — scientists, physicians and paramedics; botanists, ecologists, Sanskrit scholars, computer programmers, and community health strategists. Among the interventions they propose to evolve are strategies for nutrition, healthy ageing, low-cost delivery of safe drinking water, herbal remedy for malaria, and programmes for trans-disciplinary health sciences and technology. Because, “no single system of healthcare has best health solutions for all health needs.”

FRLHT is an organisation that has been taken seriously by health experts around the world. Among other achievements, it has already led “the largest global program for insitu conservation of medicinal plant gene pools at 110 conservation sites… across 13 States” and, as mentioned, set up India’s “only comprehensive computerised database and herbarium of medicinal plants.” It has even set up a network of village “folk healers.”

This is rare good news for Bangalore, which is otherwise burdened with an inept and unimaginative state government and an officialdom in the limbo of an election year. If Pitroda could do to healthcare and wellness what he and his team of dedicated professionals did for Indian telecommunications, we will all live in a happier and healthier India. So, welcome IHST.

source: http://www.bangaloremirror.com / Bangalore Mirror / Home> Columns> Views / by Prakash Belawadi, BM Bureau / January 17th, 2014