Department of Yoga and Consciousness Profile

The Department of Yoga & Consciousness was established by Prof. K. Rama Krishna Rao when he was the Vice-Chancellor of the University during the VI Plan period. It was called The Institute for Yoga & Consciousness. The Institute was set up by the University for fundamental research on mind-matter interaction, to undertake empirical and conceptual research on yoga and allied disciplines and to carry out extension programs related to them. The department is scientific and secular in its approach. The department is located in the Yoga Village overlooking the Bay of Bengal on the Beach Road in Visakhapatnam-3.

The Institute had two functionally independent wings; one for research and the other for extension activities. The objectives of the department are as follows:

Research wing – has been interdisciplinary in approach and international in scope, the department attempts to bring together the high technology of the West and the wisdom of the East for a fuller understanding of human nature, an understanding that reflects at once the experimental objectivity of science and the experiential richness of traditional practices.
Extension Wing: offered extension services with a three-fold purpose- 1) Offering services to the public through yoga in improving their health and well being 2) documenting the nature of problems and the benefits after availing these services 3) encouraging teaching and research staff to take up research projects of both cross-sectional and longitudinal nature .
Three-months certificate course in yoga was first introduced in 1992. Later, Post –Graduate Diploma in Yoga Course was introduced in the academic Year 1993-94. It is running successfully with student intake increasing from 20 to 40 students. The students after completing the course have set up their centers in India and abroad.
With increasing demand for short term course in yoga the department has introduced six months diploma course in Yoga.
Subsequently it became a full fledged department in the year 2010. In the academic year 2012-13 the department introduced two-year M.A. Course in Yoga.
In the forthcoming years the department is aiming to Introduce M. Phil and Ph.D. programs for the benefit of students of P.G. course to conduct research and enable them to make use of the data base generated through extension services in the department and to publish the results through research articles thereby making this knowledge more accessible to wider academic elite and making the department truly international in its status.