'China claimed it, India will own it': The battle for Sowa-Rigpa's UNESCO status

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India is pushing to reclaim Sowa-Rigpa as its heritage amid competing claims. Led by Dr Padma Gurmet, efforts span UNESCO recognition, research, and herbal cultivation to boost its global standing and industry potential.

In 2019, the Chinese Embassy in India issued a press release claiming Sowa-Rigpa - a 2,000-year-old healing tradition born in India, preached according to its foundational text by Lord Buddha at Bodh Gaya - as Chinese heritage. The claim, says the man who has spent thirty years fighting for this tradition, was "completely wrong."

India responded by filing its own UNESCO nomination for Sowa-Rigpa as Intangible Cultural Heritage. The man who prepared and submitted that dossier was Padma Shri Dr Padma Gurmet, Director of the National Institute of Sowa-Rigpa in Leh - the same man who had already spent a decade getting the Indian state to recognise its own ancient medical tradition, and who was not about to let another country claim it on the world stage.

"India has the right to claim it as its heritage," he told WION in an exclusive interview. “I think in the coming days India will pursue this again.” That pursuit - cultural, commercial, and scientific - is the story of where Sowa-Rigpa stands today, and where Dr Gurmet intends to take it.

The Battle for Ownership

The historical and textual case India has assembled is, Dr Gurmet argues, unambiguous. Sowa-Rigpa's foundational text - the Chatush Tantra - records that the system was first preached by Lord Buddha at Bodh Gaya, in India. Its earliest scholars were Indian: Jivaka, Nagarjuna, Vagbhata, Chandrananda. In the 8th century, Indian scholars carried the foundational texts across the Himalayas into Tibet, where the system was adapted to a different environment and pharmacopoeia - incorporating Tibetan folk tradition and some Chinese elements - before returning to the Indian Himalayan belt in its evolved form.

"The history of how it was first taken to Tibet is documented in the Tibetan language itself," Dr Gurmet told WION. "Chandrananda and another scholar studied the fundamental text and took it to Tibet. After that, they kept the Indian fundamentals, while also incorporating some Tibetan folk tradition and a little Chinese medicine."

China had moved first. In 2019, Beijing listed the Lum medicinal bathing traditionof Tibetan medicine on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The Chinese Embassy's simultaneous press release asserting a broader claim over Sowa-Rigpa as a whole was the provocation that forced India's hand.

"India had to take this stand because there was a press release from the Chinese Embassy in India claiming the entire system for China's UNESCO heritage, which was completely wrong," Dr Gurmet said. India's nomination was filed the same year. Dr Gurmet led the dossier preparation personally. The nomination requires amendments before resubmission - those amendments are being prepared. Bhutan, significantly, has already aligned with India's position. "Their delegation came to India, and we had good discussions with them. They also consider that the system originated with Buddha in India."

Nepal and Mongolia have joined recent workshops and conferences. A Himalayan consensus around Sowa-Rigpa's Indian origins is quietly forming.

The living continuity of the tradition on Indian soil further strengthens the claim. Even before formal government recognition, roughly 50 percent of Ladakh's populationdepended on Sowa-Rigpa practitioners - not as a supplement to modern healthcare, but as its primary form. No country can claim a living tradition more convincingly than one where half its practitioners' patients never stopped using it.

India's $11 Million Problem

The UNESCO battle is inseparable from an economic one - and the numbers make the stakes clear. India's Sowa-Rigpa industry is currently valued at approximately 11 million US dollars. China's Tibetan medicine industry - built on the same tradition, drawing from the same foundational texts - generates billions of dollars annuallyfrom the Tibetan Autonomous Region alone. China accounts for roughly 98 percentof the global commercial value of this shared heritage. India, which holds the tradition's historical roots and some of the world's finest high-altitude medicinal plant resources, holds the rest.

The primary obstacle, until very recently, was regulatory. Sowa-Rigpa formulations were not incorporated under India's Drugs and Cosmetics Act- making licensed commercial production effectively impossible for decades. "Just six months back, it was formally incorporated under the Act," Dr Gurmet told WION. "Even now, this process will take time. All the states need to circulate the Drugs and Cosmetics laws, and there should be a mechanism to get licenses for production units."

Until now, the only institution operating at meaningful scale was Men-Tsee-Khang- the Tibetan medicine institution under the government-in-exile in Dharamshala - running approximately 60 clinics across Indiaand producing medicines, wellness products, herbal teas, creams, and nutraceuticals under its own framework. That model, Dr Gurmet says, shows what is possible when structure meets tradition.

The global market conditions have never been more favourable for India to close the gap. "Internationally, people are getting back to nature, particularly after COVID. Everyone now knows that wellness is the key to life. Herbal products are the key. You can see how much the herbal industry is growing, whether nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, or cosmeceuticals. Organic is now the trend of the century."

The benchmark he holds up is Padma 28- a standardised Sowa-Rigpa polyherbal compound taken from traditional formulation to clinical validation to regulatory approval in Switzerland by a Swiss physicist Dr Gurmet describes as a personal friend. It is now formally recognised as medicine in Switzerland, with multiple peer-reviewed trials behind it. "It was a big challenge to recognise this system of medicine in Switzerland, but now it is formally recognised there as medicine."

If one physicist operating outside India could do that with a single Sowa-Rigpa formulation, the argument for what India can achieve with its full institutional weight, its Himalayan botanical resources, and its 2,000-year tradition requires no elaboration. MOUs with CSIRand leading universities are already in place. Product development is the stated next phase.

The Garden That Will Feed the Industry

Behind every future product, however, is a plant. And the plants that Sowa-Rigpa depends on are under pressure. Fifteen years ago, Dr Gurmet took on a challenge that had no precedent. Traditional practitioners across the Himalayan belt sourced their medicinal herbs through wild collection - climbing to high-altitude pastures, harvesting what the mountain offered. But wild collection at scale is unsustainable. Species are disappearing. Climate change is pushing natural habitats higher. And if even one species is lost, formulations refined over centuries go with it. "Most traditional medical practitioners rely on wild collection, which is not right. We have seen many plants becoming extinct or degraded," he told WION. "That is why I took the challenge, almost 15 years back, to set up a dedicated Trans-Himalayan herbal garden."

Today the Trans-Himalayan Herbal Gardenat 11,000 feet in Leh holds more than 100 medicinal plant species- brought down from natural habitats at 15,000 to 18,000 feet through years of patient trial. The results have surprised even the researchers. Plants that once flowered in August at 17,000 feet now bloom in April at 11,000 feet. And some have not merely survived the transition - they have improved. "For some plants, potency increases. For some plants, if you bring them to lower altitude, you get better quantities of the substances you are looking for."

The garden has become a destination for botanists studying Himalayan medicinal flora. Farmer training programmes run there regularly - teaching Ladakhi cultivators how to grow these species at commercial scale, building the supply chain that licensed production will eventually require. A second garden at higher altitude, conceived as a valley of flowers, is already in planning with Ladakh's chief secretary. "If you want to scale up traditional medicine or the herbal industry, you have to grow these plants, or you have to develop a mechanism for sustainable harvesting from the wild," Dr Gurmet said. “That is the only way to sustain it.”

The Institutional Future

With the UNESCO case advancing, commercial pathways opening, and conservation infrastructure building, the institutional future Dr Gurmet is constructing for Sowa-Rigpa is coming into sharp focus. At NISR-Leh - established in 2019 after Dr Gurmet wrote a personal letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and received a commitment within three days - the immediate priority is deemed university status. It would give the institute the autonomy to design its own curriculum, drive its own research agenda, and issue degrees calibrated to the actual frontiers of the field. "Our ambition is to make the National Institute at least a deemed university so that we can design the course curriculum ourselves. The second focus must be research. It is an ambitious project."

Formal collaboration discussions are underway with the WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre in Jamnagar. Just fifteen days before this interview, Dr Gurmet was in direct talks with the Centre. At the second WHO Global Summit on Traditional Medicine - organised with India's Ministry of AYUSH as a partner - Sowa-Rigpa was showcased in documentary form before an international gathering. "They are very interested in working with us and taking this forward through WHO schemes," Dr Gurmet said. The network extending outward from Leh now reaches Bhutan, Nepal, Mongolia, Geneva, and in Gujrat’s Jamnagar. A tradition that once had no legal standing in its own country is building an international institutional presence - one collaboration, one conference, one garden at a time.

What lies ahead?

China's claim on Sowa-Rigpa's roots has been made. India's counter-claim is being assembled - in parliamentary records, in UNESCO dossiers, in research MOUs, and in a herbal garden at 11,000 feet where ancient plants are being brought back to cultivable land for the first time. Dr Gurmet has spent thirty years refusing to accept that this tradition belongs to anyone other than the civilisation that created it. The Drugs and Cosmetics Act inclusion, the WHO partnership talks, the Himalayan network of Bhutan, Nepal, and Mongolia - all of it is moving in one direction. "The future of Sowa-Rigpa lies in scientific research and scientific validation," he told WION. “The potential is tremendous.” From Bodh Gaya to Leh to Geneva, that future is being claimed - one step at a time.

Read original articles here: https://www.wionews.com/world/-china-claimed-it-india-will-own-it-the-battle-for-sowa-rigpa-s-unesco-status-1774337789118