India's prime minister is planning a medicinal revolution — and it starts with ancient wisdom. 

Many here believe that the West has plundered the country's 3,000-year-old tradition of holistic healing to sell expensive aloe vera face creams or $6 cups of turmeric-flavored "golden milk." Now Narendra Modi, India's 67-year-old yoga-loving leader, wants to reclaim — and capitalize on — those medical traditions, known as Ayurveda. 

Documented in ancient texts, Ayurveda emphasizes prevention over cure and prescribes healthy living practices and herbal remedies. 

Brands like Aveda and Lush borrow from Ayurveda to develop skin-care products, while trendy coffee shops and juice bars in American cities repackage India's village remedies into turmeric lattes and ashwagandha smoothies. Food bloggers are raving about ghee. 

"All over the world, a parallel movement is going on for traditional medicine," said Vaidya Rajesh Kotecha, secretary of Modi's recently launched Ministry of AYUSH, an acronym that stands for ayurveda, yoga, unani, siddha and homeopathy, all traditional medicines. "India should lead. Not just to earn money, but also because it is our responsibility toward the world." 

But Ayurveda's efficacy is disputed. Modi's critics associate the Ayurveda push with his Bharatiya Janata Party's Hindu nationalist ideology. Many of Ayurveda's most prominent supporters have links with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu supremacist organization. Some proponents of Ayurveda even extol the virtues of drinking cow urine as an antidote to cancer and other illnesses, because of a belief in the cow as a holy animal. 

To relaunch "Brand Ayurveda," government agencies have filed dozens of international patents, started research programs at top Indian universities and sent experts to develop Ayurveda courses at colleges around the world. Delegates in 25 countries have set up "information cells" to spread awareness about traditional Indian knowledge.

In the desert state of Rajasthan,where water-guzzling crops often fail in the harsh climate, farmers are planting aloe vera and Indian gooseberries to replace wheat and millet.

Modi argues that since colonial times, the West has promoted modern medicine and big pharmaceutical companies' interests over traditional alternatives. As a result, he says, Indians neglected their heritage while Western companies mined Ayurvedic traditions for miracle cures, filed patents and sold products without crediting India.

"Our grandmothers' remedies have become the intellectual property rights of other countries," Modi said.

But critics say that standardization for Ayurveda is still lacking.

"We haven't got around to certifying things as being human consumable," said Sudhir Krishnaswamy, who teaches politics and law at the Azim Premji university in Bangalore. "Periodically we get these issues, like suddenly they'll say this has too much lead or this has traces of human hair. It's a totally unregulated trade." 

But for others, Ayurveda's resurgence symbolizes India's rising star.

"We've had our entire history ignored," said Rajiv Vasudevan, a chairman of the Ayurveda core group at the Confederation of Indian Industry. "Ayurveda's resurgence coincides with the resurgence of Indianness."