Haryana brings yoga into public hospitals with new Sanjeevani Yog programme

Haryana is trying to move yoga out of the studio and into the hospital corridor. Under its new Sanjeevani Yog, or SanYog, programme, the state is folding yoga and pranayama into public healthcare delivery, a shift that turns a familiar wellness practice into something closer to routine care.

Health minister Aarti Singh Rao has framed the rollout as an effort to merge traditional wellness with mainstream medical care, and the design is specific. Yoga instructors and AYUSH doctors are to be deployed across public hospitals in Haryana, including district hospitals, community health centres and primary health centres. Patients and attendants in OPDs and waiting areas will be offered yoga sessions, pranayama and healthy-lifestyle guidance, while IPD wards may also get special yoga therapy and counselling on the advice of medical officers and doctors. That structure matters: this is not just a poster on the wall or a one-off demonstration, but an attempt to build yoga into the daily flow of patient care.

The policy footing is already in place. Haryana has a statutory Haryana Yog Aayog, created under the Haryana Yog Aayog Act, 2021, with a mandate to promote, manage, regulate and train yoga and naturopathy in the state. The programme also sits comfortably inside the National AYUSH Mission, launched on 15 September 2014, which includes co-location of AYUSH facilities at PHCs, CHCs and district hospitals. At the national level, Ayushman Arogya Mandirs, the rebranded Ayushman Bharat Health and Wellness Centres, already include yoga as part of wellness-focused preventive and promotive care.

The scale of that existing network gives the Haryana plan more weight than a symbolic nod to yoga culture. The Ayushman Arogya Mandir dashboard listed 1,86,128 functional facilities across India as of 29 May 2026, and the Union government said 5.73 crore wellness sessions had been held there by 30 June 2025. That makes Haryana’s weekly Thursday health camps at Ayushman Arogya Mandirs for senior citizens look less like a pilot and more like an extension of a system already used to deliver yoga, meditation and other wellness activities. The state also plans a Vridh Sewa Evam Swasthya portal to monitor and manage data from those camps.

Haryana has been building toward this broader shift for some time. On 21 June 2025, the state announced a five-minute yoga break for government employees and a uniform yoga curriculum in all universities and colleges. SanYog now takes that same logic into public hospitals, where the real test will be whether yoga becomes a credible part of routine care, or simply the latest language of wellness entering the clinical setting.