Indian officials and teams from the World Health Organization are giving final touches to the design for the first-of-its-kind WHO Global Centre for Traditional Medicine (GCTM) in Gujarat’s Jamnagar. The project was officially launched recently by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus.
The facility will also focus on traditional medicines and therapies used across the globe, such as in Africa, Arab, Islamic and Chinese healing practices, along with working for Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha or Sowa-Rigpa.
The team of business operations of WHO and its interim office in India, will finalise the design in the coming days. As the lead investor in WHO’s GCTM, India has committed an estimated $250 million to support the centre’s establishment, infrastructure, and operations.
The floors or wings of the building can be divided into six zones based on the regions of WHO. AFRO region on African medicines, AMRO on American Medicines, EMRO on Eastern Mediterranean medicines, EURO on European Medicines, SEARO on South East Asian medicines and WPRO on Western Pacific Region medicines.
Cultures such as Osteopathy or Chiropractic will fall under AMRO, Arabic and Islamic medicines will fall under EMRO, naturopathy and homeopathy will fall under EURO, Chinese medicines, acupuncture and Tuina will fall under WPRO, whereas India’s Ayurveda, Yoga and Unani will fall under SEARO. Further, all of these zones will be divided into multiple departments.
The departments will be divided based on the objectives of the centre. The building design is visualized on the functionalities of the global centre which is divided into four areas — evidence and learning, data and analytics, sustainability and equity, and innovation and technology. Other departments include data and analytics which can help in administering and analyzing surveys and other traditional medicine data. The department of innovation and technology will help in identifying and assessing innovations and updating IT applications among other functions.
Officials say, “It is expected to have more than 100 rooms and multiple large auditoriums and conference halls. The research departments are likely to be divided on the basis of WHO’s regions that separates the traditional medicines country- or region-wise. The upcoming centre will have research centres, data labs, IT labs, centre for learning cultures and biodiversity, administration block and auditoriums apart from several other rooms for multiple purposes.”
