Tools and technologies have not been viewed as self-referential in Indian civilisation.There is an intimate connection between the soil, plants, our gut and brain. Food is not “mass”; it is living, it’s the source of life and health. The bill seeks to allow practitioners of ayurveda, yoga, naturopathy, unani, siddha and homoeopathy to practice modern medicine once they complete a short-term “bridge” course.Diverse knowledge systems are scientific within their own paradigms.In India, a multi-dimensional debate emerged when the was introduced in Parliament.While the objection of allopathic doctors is to ayurveda and other traditional medicine practitioners being able to practise “modern medicine”, my objection is to the degradation and devaluation of one of the oldest and most sophisticated health systems being swallowed by a mechanistic, commodified system.In the United States and Britain, intense debates are taking place over Obamacare and the NHS, on whether health is a public good or a privatised commodity for sale.

The chemicalisation of health has created new Iatrogenic disease which are the result of mechanistic chemical approaches and diagnostic and therapeutic procedures which result in adverse drug reactions and side-effects often more fatal than the disease being attempted to be cured.)Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah has been our philosophy and the objective which guides all science, technology and knowledge.The ayurvedic science of health is centred around food.Because we are more bacteria than human, when the poisons we use in agriculture such as pesticides and herbicides, reach our gut through food, they can kill beneficialbacteria. It is based on the ecological science of inter-connectedness.The same chemical industry that brings us toxics in agriculture also controls “modern medicine” based on pharmaceuticals.Ayurveda — the science (veda) of life (ayur) — is guided by 5,000 years of time-tested knowledge of health, nutrition and diet. Tools must be assessed on ethical, social and ecological criteria.There is a growing awareness that the plastic blow moulding machine epidemic of chronic non-communicable diseases is related to our environment and food.The industrial health system and the mechanistic reductionist paradigm of health that it is based on cannot be the future of a healthy planet and healthy people.

Ayurveda recognises that every part of the body is inter-related and that the digestive system plays an important role in both health and disease.It has thus evolved as an ecological and a systems science, not a fragmented and reductionist one. Bayer and Monsanto are now merging. But technologies are tools. Our sciences have been based on the recognition of the inter-connections and inter-relatedness between humans and nature, between diverse organisms, and within all living systems including the human body.Today, Western science has begun to realise what ayurveda understood 5,000 years ago — that the body is not a machine and food is not fuel that runs this machine as per Newton’s laws of mass and motion.Across the world, there is an intense contest emerging between two paradigms of health and two paradigms of science.