IT pros fail to keep date with Ayurveda

A session on ‘Ayur and IT,’ organised during the fourth World Ayurveda Congress, elicited a lukewarm response from IT professionals, with only 58 of the 300 people who had registered attending the event on Saturday.

The poor response did not go unnoticed by the sponsors, who wanted to withdraw but could not.

Dr Shantala Priyadarshini, Assistant Professor at Government Medical College, Mysore, and co-organiser of the session, said that while 2,010 invitations were sent out to different IT companies, 300 people had confirmed their attendance till Friday night.

“This morning, several of them mailed saying they would not be coming. It was really a poor show from the IT sector,” she said. Interestingly, the hall was packed with people during the inauguration, with Infosys COO Shibulal as the chief guest.

However, the crowd thinned thereafter. “The aim of holding this session was three-fold –– what ayurveda can offer to IT people, how ayurveda can use IT in reaching to the masses and conducting research in ayurveda, involving IT and BT sectors,” Dr Shantala said.

‘Cheap and best’

“Ayurveda can play a critical role in modern times,” S D Shibulal, co-founder of Infosys, said during the session.

With rising costs of modern health care systems, they were getting out of the reach of a large part of the population. Ayurveda can play an important role by its very nature of being “patient-centric”, “holistic” and “preventive” and being more accessible to the population.

However, currently Ayurveda did face certain challenges arising out of a lack of a more evidence-based approach and clinical research. Ayurveda could use IT to address these issues. “You can use technology to collect information, store it, mine it and use it for an evidence-based approach,” Shibulal said.

“IT can be used to collect data in a standardised manner over a long period of time and over vast geography,” Shibulal said. A Jayakumar, Secretary General, Vijnana Bharati and M K Shankaralinge Gowda, Secretary of the Medical Education Department, were also present.