In February this year, a performance audit of Uttar Pradesh’s AYUSH department by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) highlighted that Rs 2,717.79 crore was provisioned for homoeopathy services alone between 2018 and 2023.

Nearly a quarter of that amount was surrendered back to the treasury, year after year, always on the last working day of the financial calendar – a pattern that shows up when nobody really had a plan for the money in the first place. Across these five financial years, that added up to Rs 658.06 crore. What was spent didn’t always reach anyone either. The auditors also checked homoeopathic dispensaries across the state and found 81 percent of them without basic dressing or first-aid material on hand.

It’s important to remember: this is five years from one department in one state, and the shape of the problem is already apparent. The money is moving towards a system whose medical effectiveness has been rejected by every major health regulator that has looked closely, while the dispensaries it’s meant for run without bandages.

Thousands of miles away, someone was doing the arithmetic on exactly this kind of spending, out loud. This April, a scientist in a laboratory somewhere in Madrid reached for an analogy so absurd that it had to be true. To explain what a 6C dilution of a homoeopathic remedy actually contains, Spain’s medicines regulator, AEMPS, compared it to dissolving a single sachet of sugar in the entire Mediterranean Sea. It wasn’t a figure of speech for how weak the remedy is. It was a literal description of how much of the original substance is left, which is none that any instrument on Earth could detect.

The report, published on April 21, had combed through 64 systematic reviews of the scientific literature since 2009. Its conclusion was – homoeopathy’s effects are indistinguishable from placebo, for any condition, in any patient. Spain has since scrubbed its markets of all homoeopathic products that make therapeutic claims. Some 1,032 products are gone, and the 976 that remain are sold as harmless novelties, and legally barred from claiming they treat anything at all.

But we in India are paying for the opposite bet, driven straight from the top. Somewhere inside the Ministry of AYUSH’s Rs 4,408.93 crore budget sits the Central Council for Research in Homoeopathy, the body tasked with generating the scientific evidence that might eventually justify decades of public spending.

This isn’t some loose change. It’s a deliberate policy choice to keep investing in a system the rest of the world has steadily walked away from, after years of research has failed to find scientific evidence that it works. And we've already seen, in Uttar Pradesh alone, what that central intent looks like once it lands on the ground.

Spain was not the first to arrive at this conclusion. It’s the latest signatory to a consensus that's been forming for over a decade across some of the most rigorous health systems in the world, one evidence review at a time. The United Kingdom, Australia and France have all, on the record, arrived at the identical finding: homoeopathy does not work, and public money should stop pretending otherwise.

India, though, has had the same evidence in front of it, and has decided to fund it more.

What everyone else found, and said out loud

Let’s start with Australia, because its 2015 review is the most exhaustive one on record. The National Health and Medical Research Council spent over two years combing through 57 systematic reviews covering 176 individual studies across 68 health conditions, finding actual research for only 61 of them, covering everything from asthma to ADHD to chemotherapy-induced nausea. Its conclusion was stated without hedging: there is no health condition for which there is reliable evidence that homoeopathy is effective. 

The UK reached a similar place two years later. When the country’s National Health Service (NHS) moved to strike homoeopathy from routine prescription in 2017, its chief executive Simon Stevens didn't reach for diplomatic language.

"There is no robust evidence to support homoeopathy which is at best a placebo and a misuse of scarce NHS funds."

The British homoeopathic Association took the NHS to court over it, and lost. The British high court found the decision, and the evidence behind it, sound.

France held out longer, and for a reason that actually makes sense. Homoeopathy isn't a fringe practice in France. Nearly six in ten French citizens have used it, and one of the three major manufacturers, Boiron, is a genuine industrial giant. But it still folded. In 2019, the Haute Autorité de Santé reviewed some 1,200 homoeopathic products against more than a thousand scientific publications and found insufficient evidence of efficacy to justify continued reimbursement, for every single one of them. Social security funding was phased out entirely by January 2021, ending a subsidy that had cost the French state €126.8 million in 2018 alone. Boiron called it incoherent but the French government held the line anyway.

These were three separate reviews, conducted years apart by three governments, which used different methodologies to evaluate different bodies of literature, yet came to the same finding. 

The problem at home

Here’s where the story gets thick with irony. Homoeopathy was invented in Germany by the Saxon physician Samuel Hahnemann in the late 1700s. It has no claim on Indian tradition, no Ayurvedic lineage, no Unani or Siddha ancestry. It’s a European import that arrived here roughly the way tea did, and stayed for roughly the same reasons.

Even Germany’s own health minister, Karl Lauterbach, tried to walk his country’s statutory insurance away from funding homoeopathy, arguing in October 2022 that it “has no place in a science-based health insurance policy.”

In March 2025, after a 200,000-signature petition and a Bundestag hearing, Germany’s parliament decided the opposite. The coverage stays on grounds of patient choice. It’s a rare instance of a European legislature overruling its own health ministry's evidence-based instinct, and worth noting, because pretending every country marched in lockstep would be its own kind of dishonesty. Public sentiment, in France and Germany alike, has counted for something. It just hasn’t been allowed to count for everything, which is the part that matters for how a state spends public money.

That’s the distinction India's policy apparatus seems reluctant to draw. The AYUSH Ministry's justification for its homoeopathy budget leans on the same register used for Ayurveda and Unani – heritage, indigenous knowledge, and civilisational continuity. Applied to systems with genuine roots in the subcontinent, that framing at least has internal logic, whatever one makes of their clinical evidence. Applied to a 234-year-old German invention, it makes no logical sense. There is no comfortable answer to why a ministry built on the language of civilisational pride keeps writing bigger cheques for a nineteenth-century European import, effectively funding a Western pseudoscience under the banner of indigenous heritage. 

Where the money actually goes

The CAG’s Rs 2,717.79 crore is Uttar Pradesh’s number, for one department, over five years.  It isn’t the whole picture; it’s a state-level audit and as health is a state subject, the numbers for Bihar, Maharashtra, Telangana, and Tamil Nadu are sitting on a shelf that we don’t have access to.

What exists instead is the number that sits above all the states: the Ministry of AYUSH’s own budget, set in Delhi. That number isn't shrinking to compensate for what auditors found on the ground in UP. For 2026-27, the ministry’s total allocation stands at 4,408.93 crore rupees, a 10.4 per cent jump over the previous year's budget estimate.

Inside that figure sits a smaller one that matters more for this story. The Central Council for Research in Homoeopathy – the body whose entire mandate is to generate the evidence that might justify any of this – has seen its own budget rise from Rs 164 crore to Rs 227.25 crore in a single year. That’s 38.6 percent growth, nearly four times the ministry’s overall expansion rate. The money accelerating fastest is the money meant to prove homoeopathy works, flowing to an institution, which after decades of trying, still hasn’t produced anything resembling what NHMRC, NHS England or HAS went looking for, and failed to find.

How we got here

None of this legitimacy showed up overnight. In September 1948, barely a year after independence, the government appointed a Homoeopathic Enquiry Committee to look into the practice. The committee’s 1949 report recommended a Central Homoeopathic Council. It took until 1973 for that to actually become law – the Homoeopathy Central Council Act, which placed homoeopathy on the same statutory footing as modern medicine and created a central regulator, the CCH, with the power to standardise degrees, register practitioners, and open medical colleges country-wide. 

By then, the government had already folded homoeopathy research into a joint council alongside Indian medicine back in 1969, and by 1978 that had split off into a research council of its own – the direct ancestor of the CCRH, which draws Rs 227 crore a year now. The original Department of Indian Systems of Medicine and Homoeopathy (ISM&H), established in 1995, was renamed AYUSH in 2003 and became a full ministry in 2014.

The five-year plans tell roughly the same story, just slower, and with them you can actually see the money enter. Homoeopathy is there from the first plan in 1951 – a proposal for a central council, a curriculum blending modern and homoeopathic medicine. But for a long stretch after that, it stayed mostly on paper – advisory committees, small grants here and there, but nothing that really counted as central funding. 

That only changed with the ninth plan, 1997 to 2002, when the CCRH and the other research councils were brought fully under central government funding, national institutes were set up, and homoeopathy research and education finally got real Government of India money behind it. 

The 1997 policy shift is the beginning of this funding model. The 18th Report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare (2007) explicitly cites the February 1997 Conference of State Health Ministers as the moment the government formally resolved to “integrate” these systems into the public health grid. The ninth plan, the committee notes, in fact officially justified this expansion by framing these systems as “cost-effective” and “socially acceptable” alternatives for rural infrastructure.

That funding has kept moving since. It hasn’t really stopped.

The UP audit matters because it shows exactly what happens to the money once it lands. Nearly a quarter of the state’s homoeopathy allocation was surrendered, unspent, every year, on the last day of the financial calendar – the same pattern auditors found across the department’s other systems too. Money that was collected didn’t always reach patients either. DHMOs and homoeopathic government medical colleges retained Rs 42.63 lakh in user charges — money meant for hospital upkeep and patient welfare, of which they spent only Rs 1.97 lakh. The rest simply sat in the account. Auditors sampling homoeopathic dispensaries and hospitals across 8 districts found 13 out of 16 had no dressing or first-aid material on hand at all.

Hence, the fuller picture isn’t just about money spent on something with no demonstrated effect. That is a big problem sure, but a meaningful share of it isn’t being spent on anything at all – it’s provisioned, surrendered on the last possible day, or left sitting in an account meant for bandages that never got bought. And the money that is moving with real purpose is moving toward research that keeps failing to find what it set out to find.

The UK, Australia, France and now Spain looked at the evidence and made a call, in public, and lived with the fallout, be it legal challenges, industry pushback, a genuinely irate homoeopathic lobby. But India hasn’t made a call at all.

We’ve let the status quo persist and kept the tap open in a system porous enough that nobody has to watch where the water’s going.

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