Padma Shri Vaidya Balendu Prakash, who died of cardiac arrest on August 7, 2026, at 67, was a pioneering Ayurvedic physician known for evidence-based practice and global reach.
From promoting medicinal plant cultivation in Dehradun to treating chronic and complex diseases, he advanced Rasa Shastra, published internationally, held patents, and served as honorary physician to President K R Narayanan.
Padma Shri Vaidya Balendu Prakash passed away on August 7, 2026, after suffering from cardiac arrest. He was 67.
I first met Vaidya ji in 2002, when he persuaded farmers in the Raipur division of Dehradun to cultivate medicinal plants on their rocky land instead of paddy. The farmers grew konch (Mucuna pruriens), a medicinal plant prescribed in Ayurveda to improve brain function, enhance male reproductive health, and reduce everyday stress. When I visited the fields, farmers told me about the profits they had already started seeing from the sale of this legume.
Vaidya ji had shortlisted about 20 plants which could be grown in the area. He had even found a market for the produce, but a shortage of planting material was a major glitch in the plan.
At that time, medicinal plants were generally collected from the wild, and there was always a shortage of materials needed to prepare Ayurvedic medicine.
Since then, Vaidya ji was my go-to person for the stories I did on medicinal plants. He had a sharp mind and would question my line of thought, often turning my ideas on their head. I had to be very alert when talking to him, but it was always fun due to his ready anecdotes and playful banter.
He had developed a close bond with Down To Earth when he had treated the magazine’s founding editor Anil Agarwal for cancer at his hospital and research centre in Dehradun.
Prakash was the honorary physician to the President of India K R Narayanan from 1997 to 2000. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 for his contributions to Ayurveda.
Born in Meerut, he studied Ayurveda and followed his father’s footsteps, practicing Rasa Shastra, one of the eight specialities of Ayurveda. Rasa shastra involves purification and calcination techniques to turn raw elements such as mercury into medicine; this was a controversial form of therapy due to the use of toxic materials. Detailed protocols needed to be followed for turning these toxic materials into safe and fast-acting formulas. He set up a Ras Shala (production centre) at Padaav Speciality Ayurvedic Treatment Center, a specialty Ayurvedic hospital which he had established in Dehradun in 1988. The hospital shifted to Rudrapur in Uttarakhand a few years ago.
He was sought after for his treatment of chronic diseases like allergic rhinitis, migraine, nutritional anaemia, hepatitis, and acute promyelocytic leukemia—diseases that modern medicine could only manage symptomatically.
Vaidya ji believed in evidence-based Ayurveda and constantly collected data to validate his treatment. For example, pancreatitis is a globally life-threatening disease with no known cure. The disease is often attributed to alcohol, toxins and heredity. But Vaidya ji noticed that most of his patients did not consume alcohol and had no family history of the disease. His observations suggested that pancreatitis was caused by micronutrient deficiency, and he successfully treated it with Ayurvedic medicines which are more or less just micronutrients. He has nearly 30 international publications and two international patents to his credit.
This quest to improve Ayurveda set him apart from other well-known Ayurvedic physicians of the time. Vaidya Balendu Prakash treated thousands of patients across the globe, and he will surely be missed by them.