Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to inaugurate the newly-built Vaidik Vigyan Kendra or the Centre for Vedic Sciences at Banaras Hindu University (BHU), during his visit to his parliamentary constituency on Sunday. The Centre has been set up to explore Vedic corpus for knowledge, related to various sciences, and conduct multi-disciplinary research and promote scientific approach into the vision of seers.

Modi had laid the foundation of the centre, being established with financial support of the Uttar Prdesh government, in September 2018.

BHU Vice-Chancellor Professor Rakesh Bhatnagar said there was a need for research on establishing a linkage between ancient wisdom and modern knowledge and exploring the Vedas, the illustrious source of knowledge.

The Centre will play a major role in this. It will prepare reference documents/books, formalize scientific study of various aspects of Vedic intellectual heritage, promote logical and scientific achievements of Vedic scholars and collaborate with national and international research institutions to conduct joint research.

The Centre's coordinator Upendra Kumar Tripathi said that the centre would run research projects and collect Vedic manuscripts for publication. "It has been established to explore the glorious past of Vedic sciences for popularizing them and has a modern state-of-art laboratory for study and research on effect of Vedic mantras, rituals, yoga and meditation on human mind through neuropsychological studies," he said.

Various branches of Vedic studies like rituals, music, architecture, astrology, astronomy, cosmology, medicine, surgery, yoga, mathematics, metallurgy have remained unexplored and the centre aims at bridging the gap by connecting them with modern science and technology.

The Uttar Pradesh government had made a provision of Rs 16 crore for the Centre in the 2019-20 state budget. Earlier, the government had provided Rs 12 crore for the construction of building and Rs 2 crore for infrastructure development.