The Ministry of Home Affairs has announced the creation of a new type of visa, Ayush Visa, for foreigners who want to visit the country for medical treatment including therapeutic care, wellness and yoga in India.
The introduction of this special visa will fulfill the purpose of introducing a special visa system for foreigners visiting India for for treatment across different streams.
The report added that Ayush Visa aims to address the need to introduce a special visa system for foreigners. Referring to this, Union Minister Ayush Sarbananda Sonowal added that the new initiative will help promote medical tourism in India and will further their efforts to make traditional Indian medicine a global phenomenon.
Earlier, in 2022, Prime Minister Modi announced the establishment of the Ayush Visa, seeking to make it part of the Indian Roadmap for government treatment in India.
Later, the Ministry of Ayush and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare collaborated to develop a unique Heal in India portal to promote India as one of the top medical tourism destinations in the world.
According to the report “The Global Wellness Economy: Beyond COVID” by the Global Wellness Institute (GWI), the global wellness economy is expected to grow at 9.9% per year. This provides an estimate that the health and wellness economy of Ayush will reach $70 billion by 2025, with a significant increase in health benefits travel.
To promote the health benefits of travel in Ayurveda and other forms of traditional medicine, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoM) was recently signed with the India Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC), Ministry of Tourism, GoI.
With the central government’s introduction of the Ayush visa for foreigners seeking medical treatments such as healing, wellness and yoga in India, Ayurvedic practitioners in Kerala are also hoping that this will boost medical tourism. Here.