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Time of India
22-06-2025
- Health
- Time of India
Govt aims to make yoga a way of life for people: CM
Visakhapatnam: Chief minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu on Saturday announced that the state govt will soon introduce the 'Visakhapatnam Declaration', which would encompass all activities related to yoga and aims to make yoga a way of life for people. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Emphasising that yoga, naturopathy, and ayurveda are ancient treasures of India, he recalled that during the tenure of TDP founder NTR in 1987, the govt introduced the Yoga Dhyana Parishad Act, which brought yoga from private ashrams into formal education system. "We will think logically about how to progress. The state is spending 18,000 crore on health, with around 5,000 crore allocated under NTR Arogya Sri program," he stated. Visakhapatnam Declaration will focus on research, introduction of yoga in schools, promote routine physical activity among the public, and explore the economic benefits of wellness, he said, adding that it is expected to be released within a month or two. As part of the Declaration, the govt will publish a coffee table book for inspiration and create a promotional video to showcase yoga on national and international platforms. "The state govt is already collaborating with the Bill Gates Foundation to establish digital health records through artificial intelligence. This initiative will combine technology and knowledge for preventive health, real-time monitoring, and curative solutions, while focusing on cost-effectiveness," Naidu said. After reviewing the outcomes of the Yoga event, CM Naidu noted that Yogandhra was a resounding success, showcasing the enthusiasm of the people and the blessings of nature. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now He praised the efforts of various officials, including Chief Secretary Vijayanand, Special Chief Secretary M.T. Krishna Babu, District Collector Harendira Prasad, and DGP Gupta. He commended their use of technology, effective planning, tracking methodologies, and accountability. Expressing his gratitude to Prime Minister Narendra Modi for selecting Visakhapatnam to host the 11th edition of event, the CM urged people to adopt yoga as a daily practice, emphasising that a healthy, wealthy, and happy Andhra Pradesh is central to the vision of Swarnandhra 2047. "The state govt is committed to equitable development across all regions. Major industries, including Google, TCS, and Cognizant are starting operations in Visakhapatnam. The govt plans to create an economic corridor encompassing Srikakulam, Vizianagaram, Visakhapatnam, and East Godavari districts, which aims to surpass even Mumbai. Additionally, another corridor centred around Tirupati will form the Rayalaseema economic corridor, along with another one based in Amaravati. I am committed to create 20 lakh jobs, not only in DSC but across all depts. We are moving in that direction," he asserted. Noting that responsibility is more important than the methods used to achieve goals, he said power will not guarantee recognition. "What matters is the work you do. Involvement in negative activities will yield negative results. My perspective was always different. Since 1995, I envisioned paths that many did not believe in," he added.
Hans India
20-06-2025
- Health
- Hans India
PM to grace Int'l Yoga Day fete at Vizag
Vijayawada: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had played a key role in globalizing interest in yoga by getting the United Nations to declare June 21 as International Day of Yoga, will participate in the celebrations to be held on Saturday in Visakhapatnam in which five lakh people are expected to take part. Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu declared this while speaking to media persons here on Thursday. The Chief Minister said that yoga practice should become a part of daily life. Everyone should practice yoga as it would help prevent diseases. He said that there was tremendous response to the one-month yoga practice campaign in the state, with 2.39 crore people registering, against the target of 2 crore people. The Chief Minister said that arrangements had been made at Visakhapatnam to celebrate the International Day of Yoga in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi will participate. He said that 3.9 lakh yoga seats had been arranged right from RK beach to Bhogapuram. He said the event would help set a world record meriting entry in Guinness World Records. Besides,there would be live coverage of the event. The Chief Minister said yoga would be practiced simultaneously at 1.30 lakh places in the state and at eight lakh places across the country. He said five lakh yoga mats and five lakh Yoga T shifts would be distributed among those who attend the International Day of Yoga celebrations at Vizag. He said transport arrangements had been made for people and Wi-Fi would be available at 326 places at the venue in Visakhapatnam. The Chief Minister said that the state government would introduce yoga practice for students right from 9th class. Stating that Yoga practice was the best alternative for preventing health issues, he said that, with the help of Bill Gates Foundation, it will be observed in AP as a proof of concept. Simultaneously, a non-profit organisation would be set up to take yoga practice everywhere in the state to improve health of people. The Chief Minister said K Muralidhar of AP had launched a start-up and come up with 'Yogiy-a', smart yoga app based on artificial intelligence. Muralidhar, explaining its features, said that sensor-fitted mat would be connected via blue tooth so that the smart app and mat can together help teach people to practice yoga in the correct manner.
Hans India
17-06-2025
- Health
- Hans India
Visakhapatnam Declaration to be announced on June 21
Visakhapatnam: In order to strengthen yoga practice among future generations and make it a way of life, Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu said that a 'Visakhapatnam' declaration will be announced on the 'International Yoga Day' (IYD) on June 21. Recommending that yoga needs to be promoted in a big way at a media conference held in Visakhapatnam on Monday, the Chief Minister said that assessment will be made to analyse what needs to be done to take yoga to the next level. 'In line with it, suggstions will be sought from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to work on an action plan to derive desired results with the coordination of the Central government. With the consent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi a 'Visakhapatnam declaration' will be announced,' the Chief Minister told The Hans India, responding to a query. Expressing confidence that the mega IYD event is likely to get into Guinness World Records, the Chief Minister stated that the event is also expected to create 22 records. 'In AP, 25 lakh participants will also get certificates from the AP government for their three-day participation in the celebrations. Through QR code, those taking part in the IYD event on June 21 will receive certificates from Guinness World Records,' Naidu said, terming it as a wonderful opportunity for the participants. Naidu exhorted all sections of people to take part in the event and make it a household celebration. The next four days are considered as crucial to make the event a grand success, Naidu underlined. Defining yoga as heritage wealth, Naidu said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi revived it and it is the responsibility of every individual to take it to the future generations. Along with protection of health, the Chief Minister advocated that yoga aids in enhancing productivity. He urged the people to allot 30 minutes in the 24 hours of a day for yoga to stay healthy and adopt yoga as a way of life to make the State 'healthy Andhra Pradesh'. Naidu stated that the month-long Yogandhra aims to reach out to large sections of communities and there are plans to campaign for yoga even after the IYD event. Focusing on protection of health and real-time monitoring, Naidu said the AP government was collaborating with Bill Gates Foundation to moot a pilot project in the State. 'With knowledge and technology from the Foundation, it will be implemented in the State. After deriving results, the project will be expanded in other parts of the country and world. A proof of concept was initiated in Kuppam. In six months, the project will be rolled out in Chittoor and it will be scaled up for the rest of the State in two years,' the Chief Minister assured.
United News of India
16-06-2025
- Health
- United News of India
AP: Five lakh people to practice Yoga on IYD in Visakhapatnam; PM to participate
Visakhapatnam, June 16 (UNI) Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu has said that over five lakh people will practice Yoga on International Yoga Day June 21 in Visakhapatnam in a programme in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi will participate. The international Yoga programme will be organised at RK beach in Visakhapatnam. The Chief Minister reviewed the arrangements for the International Yoga Day celebrations at RK Beach, here on Monday accompanied by officials. Later, talking to the media, Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu stated that all arrangements are in place for the International Yoga Day celebrations to be held on June 21 at RK Beach, Visakhapatnam. He noted that Visakhapatnam is set to host this grand event, with five lakh people performing yoga together at a single location. He said that he had inspected the arrangements at the main stage being prepared for Prime Minister Narendra Modi on RK Beach Road and given several suggestions to the officials. He also visited the Andhra University College Ground to assess preparations there. A review meeting was later held at Novotel with officials, alliance public representatives, and leaders, followed by an interaction with the media. 'This is the largest and most significant event I have overseen so far. Yoga will be a game-changer in the health sector. We will announce the Visakhapatnam Yoga Day Declaration, which will detail what the Central and State governments can do,' he announced. 'Prime Minister Narendra Modi identified Visakhapatnam as an ideal venue for the 11th International Yoga Day and expressed confidence in our ability to organise it successfully,' Naidu mentioned. 'We are conducting month-long activities across AP. This is unprecedented. "On June 21st, yoga events will be held at one lakh locations across Andhra Pradesh, with two crore people participating. Already, 2.17 crore people have registered. We will issue certificates to 25 lakh participants. We are attempting a Guinness World Record and we will achieve it,' the Chief Minister acknowledged. "The Bill Gates Foundation has come forward to support the health sector in Andhra Pradesh. A pilot project has begun in Kuppam. In six months, it will expand to Chittoor, and in two years, across the state. I will transform AP into a Healthy Andhra – a healthy, wealthy, and happy state. Negative thinking leads to negative results; pure thoughts lead to pure outcomes,' he noted. UNI DP RN
Hindustan Times
09-05-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Gates Foundation to be remain ‘engaged deeply' in India: CEO Mark Suzman to HT
Microsoft founder Bill Gates on Thursday pledged to donate almost all his wealth over the next two decades, including around $200 billion, through his foundation, the Bill Gates Foundation, which he plans to close by December 31, 2045. That commitment to the foundation is around twice what he ploughed into it in its first 25 years of existence. The foundation has been very active in India and in the context of the announcement, Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman spoke to HT's editor-in-chief R Sukumar. Edited excerpts: Apart from the fact that this is 25 years of the Gates Foundation, you were also an early entrant into India. India was probably the first overseas operation for the Gates Foundation, 2003. And back then, the Indian philanthropy sector was pretty much in its infancy. Sure, there were always people who were giving, but I don't think it was formalised. I don't think people were looking at the outcomes. Can you tell us a bit about how you see the space having changed in this period, and also the role that the Gates Foundation has played as a catalyst in facilitating this change? Yes. India was the first country where we established an office outside the United States in the early 2000s, initially working on HIV/AIDS, and then broadening into the full range of work we do across health and agricultural development, financial inclusion, sanitation, a wide range of priorities, all very aligned with the government's priorities. And also, India was one of the earliest places where Bill and Melinda started focusing very much on, how can we help support and build a stronger domestic philanthropic sector? And you're right, there were long traditions of philanthropy that the Tatas, in particular, have long established history of philanthropic leadership in India. But I think what the Gates Foundation and Bill and Melinda, personally, were able to help provide was catalysing more of a dialogue among many of the wealthy in India about their wider philanthropic opportunities and ways in which they could work together. And that's certainly been one of the signature things that we've observed in India over the last 20 years now, is a significant expansion in the philanthropic sector, and an energy and attention and great leadership, a number of people joining the Giving Pledge, including Nandan Nilekani, Azim Premji, others who have become truly global leaders and global examples of how to do effective and smart philanthropy. And that's something we're continuing to build on. We're working on a couple of exciting new partnerships, which we hope to be able to announce in the near future that are philanthropic partnerships. And we've developed strong partnerships with other groups, like the Piramal Foundation. We work extensively in Bihar, specifically, but also a range of other districts where we've been working with – directed by NITI Aayog, many of the poorer and most destitute districts in the tribal areas and elsewhere. And so, India has been a great example and a model of how philanthropy can work closely with government and generate and support the private sector and deliver outcomes. And in fact, India overall has been an amazing model over the past 25 years of how it can successfully look at the needs of its citizens in areas like health and agricultural development. It's an amazing story. What are the really big successes that you think you've managed to achieve in this period, two or three things that really stand out? Well, first, I just want to emphasize that we don't do anything on our own as the Gates Foundation. All our successes – are very much done in partnership with the government, with other philanthropists, with private sector partners. But in a number of areas, India's successes that we've helped contribute to include your massive scale up and improvement in Indian vaccination and the reduction in child mortality across India. We helped work and develop new vaccines, like the rotavirus vaccine that was developed with Indian expertise and Indian knowledge. And that's a vaccine which is also now being used globally by the GAVI vaccine alliance that helps bring down childhood deaths from diarrhoea. We helped expand access to a range of other vaccines as well. We worked with Prime Minister Modi when he made a signature commitment around the Swachh Bharat program. I think the sanitation work that we've done together – we awarded the Prime Minister a Goalkeepers Award several years ago at the United Nations – has been an area where India has really shown massive global leadership, and we've been proud to contribute to. More recently, there's been some really good work being done in agricultural development. There's the work we've been doing with the government of Odisha, now the government of Bihar about developing, pioneering new AI-enabled apps that are helping small holder farmer development, helping them get access to prices, to understand what services they can get from the government, to figure out, get real-time analysis, satellite data on weather forecasts, their soil, what they can be used for fertilizer. Those are pioneering activities that India is now leading the world on. And the other area, big area has been the whole expansion of digital public infrastructure and inclusive financial services, where India, with the universal ID system, that's now become a global model. Again, we've helped provide some technical support, but the real leadership's come from India, first from Nandan Nilekani and then with the government. Those are a number of the areas that I think we're very proud of having helped contribute to, and we can see the results in the massive improvements that India has had, in more than halving preventable child mortality over that period, and significant reductions of maternal mortality and huge reductions in extreme poverty. At the time we started the Foundation, India and South Asia actually had the largest number of extreme poor in the world, and that is no longer the case. And so, it's been a remarkable quarter century in Indian development, and it's part of what's made us excited about what's possible, and it's helped inspire both our work elsewhere in the world, elsewhere in Asia and in Africa. And as we think about the next 20 years with the announcement we're making, the model of India is very much one we have in mind that we hope some of those successes can be replicated elsewhere. When you speak about these successes, and I guess what you were referring to is the fact that if something works well here, you could take the model elsewhere in the world, and see whether it works there, what are some of the things that have worked in India which you've managed to take out and use in other parts of the world? Initially, we were very focused on what we could do within India, and now that shift in the last five to 10 years has really been shifting into where are some of those lessons? Some of them have happened just…well, I would say naturally, because we've helped engage, but that India has already provided global public goods, and that is in the area of vaccine manufacturing. We did a lot of the original partnerships, both through ourselves, through the GAVI Vaccine Alliance, which we helped form, and our major funders of, with the original contracts with companies like Serum Institute and Bharat Biotech and others in the sector, who are now the largest global vaccine manufacturers and the largest supplier of vaccines all across the world. India has shown it can be a global leader in a space, and we fully expect that to continue. A lot of what we were looking at in our recent trip was in areas like diagnostics now. Low-cost diagnostics for diseases like tuberculosis, or new tools that are actually able to monitor pregnant mothers. We have a fetal monitoring system that's quite robust, but technically accurate and informed by AI that's being piloted in India. And the key thing with the Indian innovations, and one of the reasons why they are so rapid, is they're actually – the phrase we like to use is frugal innovation. India is a place where we've been able to drive down the cost and make these cost effective, because there are lots of interventions we know are successful on their own, but are just far too expensive to be scaled up across low and middle income countries. But the Indian models are really about how you do this in a high quality, but very cost effective way, that that's where they led the way in vaccines. And then, above all, the most important area where India is truly a global leader, is around the digital public infrastructure agenda. We've already worked and we helped cofound the institute called MOSIP, which I also visited when I was in Bangalore. MOSIP now helps provide, I think it's over 20 countries with their own digital identity systems building on the Aadhaar system, or the model of the Aadhaar system. And now there's other partnerships, like the Co-Develop partnership that we're also partnering with Nandan Nilekani on, that are helping with a wide range of additional tools. And this was a priority of the Indian G20 where we help provide some support to the government on shaping that agenda, and that's been taken up through subsequent G20s, both the Brazilian G20 last year and the South African G20 this year. And there'll actually be a major event on digital public infrastructure in Cape Town later this year, which is very much building on that Indian model. And that's the area we're very excited about, going forward. In the context of the announcement on doubling the investment that you've made so far and the Foundation, as you go forward, are there any new focus areas that are going to come in India, because you spoke about agriculture, and I know you've been doing some work there? One area which I think would be of special interest to India is climate adaptability, given the fact that we are already seeing some of the impacts of the climate crisis play out in various parts of the country. Could you just tell us a little bit of what the Foundation is doing in that area? Effectively, in our first 25 years, we've spent $100 billion and the commitment now is over what will be our final 20 years as a foundation, we will spend on the order of an additional $200 billion. And the intent is, we do not intend to focus on new areas. It's very much going to be focused on the existing areas that we've been prioritizing, helping drive preventable child mortality as close to zero as possible, helping really eradicate or control the world's deadliest infectious diseases, like polio. Actually, I forgot to cite that. India's great success on polio eradication, which came in 2011, which we helped support, it's the biggest milestone in polio eradication. We always thought India would likely be the last country to eradicate polio. And in fact, it's now still endemic in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where it's well over a decade since India successful eradicated polio. We hope we can eradicate malaria. Add malaria to that list and bring HIV and tuberculosis fully under control. And both of those are core priorities for Prime Minister Modi as well and the Indian government. And then the third category is helping ensure that those are able to thrive, and that is continuing to focus in the key areas of digital public infrastructure and agricultural development, with a strong focus on gender equality and women's economic empowerment. And that definitely does include climate adaptation. Our big focus on climate adaptation is really how you do more effective agricultural use? We do that in a couple of ways. One is in research and development, and we are working with ICAR, the Indian Center for Agricultural Research, which we also visited when we were in India recently, in a number of areas, including more resilient crops and livestock that can help withstand floods and droughts and more frequent weather events. And we've had some success in India over the last decade or two, in particular, a breed of rice that can stay fertile when it's submerged after flood waters for twice as long as regular rice. And so, we'll keep doing those investments and scaling them. The app I mentioned, the AI app that helps smallholder farmers, actually also works with climate adaptation by allowing much more targeted use of fertilizer and irrigation, because it's able to use these advanced technologies to both do digital soil health mapping. Climate adaptation will remain a high priority for us going forward, but very much with a focus on the agricultural development space, because that's such a critical engine for both poverty reduction, but also, more broadly, economic growth. The one point I wanted to make on that was just our, now, date of ending the Foundation, which is the end of 2045, is pretty close to the 2047 Viksit Bharat, a date that the Prime Minister and the government has set for India becoming a middle income nation. And so, certainly, our intention is to stay engaged deeply in India for our entire lifetime as a foundation. We're very proud of the work we've done. We look forward to doing a lot more work together, going forward. And we hope that the work we're doing together with the philanthropic sector, with the government, with our private sector partners, will make a critical contribution to the Viksit Bharat goal, going forward.
