From cure in cow urine to 'superior child', pseudoscience inviting research

A pregnant woman should wear a specific gemstone, clothes of specific colours, offer specific flowers to the gods and recite a specific chapter from The Gita to receive the benefits of planets that influence her and the foetus in each month of pregnancy. That was the advice Shraddha Vyas had for a group of Ayurveda practitioners, or vaidyas, who sat in a building named Kunverbhai Jain Dharamshala in Jamnagar district of Gujarat.

Vyas is a lecturer at the Jamnagar-based Gujarat Ayurved University. She was one of the speakers at a five-day workshop organised by Karishma Narwani, director of Garbhvigyan Anusandhan Kendra, an NGO, in Jamnagar in late January this year. The NGO’s name translates as “Womb Science Research Centre”.

The lectures covered different aspects of garbh sanskar — a set of procedures apparently derived from ancient Hindu texts to guide couples to have an uttam santati, or “superior child” who is mentally, physically and spiritually strong. Vaidyas from six Indian states participated in the workshop. To conceive an uttam santati, the married couple should have sex when their ruling planets were aligned, said Vyas. Participants took notes.

Narwani claims that so far 476 couples have had their “superior child” following garbh sanskar’s “scientific procedure”. It’s a claim scientists aren’t buying. Parts of garbh sanskar are “totally pseudoscientific,” says Soumitro Banerjee, general secretary of Breakthrough Science Society, a Kolkata-based non-profit that promotes science. Pseudoscience is a set of beliefs or practices that masquerades as science to claim legitimacy.

There are other projects like garbh sanskar, some even initiated by the government. Or, promoted by Hindu organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Promoting pseudoscience in the garb of Vedic literature has been an integral part of the RSS agenda since the early 20th century, says Meera Nanda, a science historian and author of the book Science in Saffron. The eagerness for scientific legitimisation of Hindu dharma and Vedas is actively fostered by Hindu nationalists and their allies, she writes in one of her essays. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too, a member of the Hindutva-driven Bharatiya Janata Party, invoked the elephant-headed god Ganesha as evidence of plastic surgery and Karna, a character from The Mahabharata, as proof of “genetic science” in October 2014.

Garbhvigyan Anusandhan Kendra is the brainchild of Narwani and her teacher, Hitesh Ishwarlal Jani, a senior lecturer at Gujarat Ayurved University. Narwani received her bachelor’s in Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery from the same university, with special interest in garbh sanskar, which was part of her coursework. During her internship in 2003 at an Ayurveda health clinic chaired by Jani, they spent hours talking about garbh sanskar. Around that time, Jani claims to have used Ayurveda to help a couple whose two children had died of thalassemia to have a third child without the disease. “Karishma ji and I discussed whether we could help couples have children with good genes, and devoid of any genetic disorder,” Jani, who has been an RSS swayamsevak since childhood, tells me. “Parents should have the right to customise the baby they want.” Only strong children can build a strong India, he adds.

Seven-year-old Hiya Changani’s mother, Aarti, believes that her daughter, who has won numerous medals across different sports, is an uttam santati whom she conceived after following garbh sanskar. Photos: Ankur Paliwal

Narwani then spent a year researching ancient Hindu texts of Ayurveda and astrology to write the guidelines for creating uttam santati and to treat infertility. In 2005, Narwani founded the NGO, with RSS members on the board, and decided to not marry and instead devote herself to the “cause”.

The guidelines include specific monthly instructions, especially for the woman, about diet (mostly vegetarian and derived from the cow), yoga, breathing exercises, self-conduct and feeding the cow. It begins with a 90-day plan that includes “purification of the body”, followed by a 72-day plan to form a “good quality” sperm and egg, which is then followed by “purification of the environment” through yajna. This done, the couple is advised a specific date and time, based on the alignment of their planets, to have sex to invite a “pure soul” into the embryo. Narvani claims that all 476 couples conceived with  this prescription.

After conception, the mother has to follow a strict monthly plan that includes listening to a set of compact discs loaded with specific sounds derived from the shlokas. “This planning is in sync with the organ development of the foetus,” Narwani tells me. The NGO’s clinic, Ved Garbha, charges Rs 50,000 from a couple for garbh sanskar. 

Narwani emphasises that the mother’s activities and thoughts influence the foetus. So, if the couple wants the child to be good in math, the mother should do math puzzles such as Sudoku. “This is all scientific,” she insists.

Where is the scientific evidence?” asks Arun Gadre, a Pune-based gynaecologist who has worked in rural Maharashtra for 20 years. Gadre and other gynaecologists say that although a balanced diet, yoga and breathing exercises help in pregnancy, mixing them with astrology and mantras make mumbo-jumbo of the whole procedure. Agrees Subha Sri Balakrishnan, a Chennai-based gynaecologist and chairperson of CommonHealth, a coalition for maternal-neonatal health and safe abortion. “I respect Ayurveda but such claims malign what science stands for,” she says. She adds that it could be argued that science itself has not yet caught up with some of the claims that garbh sanskar makes, but the only way to test the validity of those claims is through well-designed research. 

Science is not based on beliefs and assertions. Scientific process requires you to develop a hypothesis and then design an experiment to test that hypothesis, which could be proven true or false. Claiming that 476 couples got the child they wanted by following garbh sanskar is anecdotal, “which is a low-quality evidence,” says Balakrishnan. The scientific way would be to do a randomised controlled study, explains Banerjee. In such studies, people participating in the trial are randomly assigned to two different groups. The experimental group receives the treatment and the other doesn’t. Their results are compared to check whether or not the treatment worked. Narwani’s NGO has not done this study.

Gujarat has seven such centres, some run by Vidya Bharti, the educational wing of the RSS. Arogya Bharti, the RSS’s health wing, will set up centres in West Bengal and Karnataka. Narwani plans to open centres across India.

While Narwani encourages expecting couples to keep a cow in their house to receive “positive energy”, the animal has also become the subject of a pseudoscience project initiated by the Modi government. In 2017, the Department of Science and Technology (DST) started a project — Scientific Utilisation Through Research Augmentation-Prime Products (Panchagavya) from Indigenous Cows, or SUTRA-PIC. Panchagavya is a concoction of five cow products — milk, urine, dung, curd and ghee. Documents sourced by Business Standard through the Right to Information Act reveal that although the government has renamed the project SUTRA-PIC (earlier called Scientific Validation and Research on Panchagavya), the project’s objectives include “validation of utility products from indigenous cows”.

That makes it pseudo-scientific, says Banerjee. “If you want to validate something, that means you already believe it is true.” In research that begins with this bias, scientists tend to design experiments that lead to favourable results, adds Nanda. The project is coordinated by Virendra Kumar Vijay, head of the Center for Rural Development and Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Vijay refused to answer questions related to the project.

There is more that clouds the scientific transparency of this project. The 19-member National Steering Committee, constituted by DST and chaired by Science and Technology Minister Harsh Vardhan, has members with conflict of interest. Sunil Mansinghka, for example, runs Go Vigyan Anusandhan Kendra, a project of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in Nagpur. Mansinghka tells me that his research centre collaborates with government research institutions across India to “validate the benefits of panchagavya”. He says, “What is written there [in ancient texts] is absolute truth and relevant even today.” India’s malnutrition can only go away by drinking the milk of indigenous cow, he continues. “Cow urine also cures cancer and many other diseases,” he adds. Co-chairman of the committee, Vijay Bhatkar is also the president of RSS-linked Vijnana Bharati, a science movement “with swadeshi spirit”. A Jaykumar, another member, is Vijnana Bharati’s secretary general.

According to the minutes of the committee’s first meeting held in August last year, members agreed that Rs 100 crore would be required for the first three years of the programme. 

Mansinghka emailed me a compilation of research papers about panchagavya. There were about 15 studies on cow urine. Some were done by Ram Swaroop Chauhan, professor of pathology at the College of Veterinary and Animal Sciences in Pantnagar, Uttarakhand. Chauhan tells me he has been researching panchagavya for over two decades. “It is used as a diuretic, laxative and for treatment of chronic malaria, enteritis, constipation, baldness, headaches, fever, chemical intoxication, ageing, et cetera. It is proved as a universal curer of blood disorders, leucorrhoea and even leprosy,” reads one of the papers Chauhan co-authored. 

In the paper, Chauhan also gives examples of people who recovered from cancer after drinking cow urine. Two of the three papers were published in the International Journal of Cow Science in the same year that he was the editor-in-chief of the journal. Around the same time, Chauhan was the president of the Cow Therapy Society, which publishes the journal.

“Saying that some people got cured of cancer by consuming cow urine doesn’t work in science unless you show that this is statistically significant,” says A K Garg, scientist at the Bareilly-based Indian Veterinary Research Institute. Statistical significance means that it is unlikely that the result has occurred by chance.

Garg has scanned about 100 research papers on panchagavya in the last two months to determine potential areas of research. “So far, most of the research has been superficial,” says Garg. “Most of those papers are not in good peer-reviewed journals.”

  

The number of journals that publish mediocre papers have been rising over the years. “Predatory journals have a big hand in promoting pseudoscience,” says Upinder Bhalla, professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru. Bhalla, Garg and other scientists say that there is no harm researching cow products, provided scientific methods are followed. Pseudoscience takes people away from how science works, says Bhalla. “It is for scientists and communicators to present the authentic version.”

On the fourth day of the workshop, Narwani took participants to a school run by Vidya Bharti in Vibhapar village, 25 km from Jamnagar. They met the NGO workers who promote garbh sanskar in the village. “The entire village has decided to follow garbh sanskar,” Hiteshri Patel, one participant, told me. After attending the workshop, Patel is convinced about the power of garbh sanskar. She plans to have a child and will follow garbh sankar. As an Ayurveda practitioner, she will also promote garbh sanskar in Patan, a district in Gujarat where she lives.

In Jamnagar, I met two mothers, Aarti Changani and Kajal Gosrani, who believe that they got the child they desired through garbh sanskar. When I asked them why they would recommend garbh sanskar to their friends, they replied, “Because it is scientific.”