Uncover the epic juxtaposition of a Russian public health practitioner and a traditional Indian healer who spends 4 months at Parul University exploring the ins and outs of Ayurveda – Meet Iaroslav Baranov, who studied at the CIRR & explored the model behind it!

Most international student arrivals in India look the same on paper. Mr. Iaroslav Baranov did not. He was forty years old when he landed at Parul University. He had spent years working inside Russia’s public health department, and on the side, he had been practising traditional healing as a hands-on practitioner. He did not arrive in India to start studying a subject from the beginning. He arrived to deepen, compare, and broaden a body of knowledge he had been building for most of his professional life. The combination is not common at student exchange desks, and it shaped almost every decision the Centre for International Relations and Research (CIRR) made about his stay.

As based on the interview with Mr. Monty Dsouza, Assistant Manager at CIRR (Centre for International Relations & Research) at Parul University, he was the key coordinator of Mr. Iaroslav Baranov’s programme. He came on the 2nd February and left the campus on 31st May 2026, wherein, in the phase of 4 months, his course was structured across 3 phases, and he explored personalised academic support and curriculum. This programme is officially titled as a tailor-made programme under the policies of the university.

Mr. Iaroslav Baranov came from ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, one of Russia’s leading technical and scientific research universities. His academic focus was public health sciences, but the framing of the student does not quite fit. He was simultaneously a working professional in Russia’s public health department and an active traditional healer. The split between learner and practitioner that most exchange desks rely on did not apply to him. He arrived in India already operating professionally in both fields he had come to study.

His age mattered. Mr. Dsouza was specific about that. As a 40-year-old with a clinical and professional track record behind him, gave Mr. Baranov a different kind of presence in classrooms full of younger students. The programme treated his maturity as a working asset rather than a complication. He was given more independent space than a typical exchange student. He was expected to push back in discussions, contribute from his clinical experience, and lead activities where appropriate. The expectations were calibrated to a peer, not to a passive recipient.

As of the interview, he was the only student to have come to Parul University from ITMO. Two or three more were already in the pipeline for upcoming summer-school cycles, which suggests the institutional relationship is starting to gain weight.

His funding was partially supported. He covered international travel, visa processing, and foreign currency exchange himself. Parul University covered everything from the moment he landed in India: accommodation, food, airport pickup, local transport, in-country excursions, all of it. The arrangement is deliberate. It lowers the financial barrier to entry for students whose home institutions cannot fully sponsor, while keeping the cost-sharing transparent enough that the relationship stays academic rather than transactional. So if you’re passionate about how AI in Ayurveda is progressing every day, enrol in the Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery (BAMS) – a course perfectly designed to take you back to the Indian Ayurvedic Era in sync with modern healthcare practices.

Mr Baranov’s curriculum spanned four academic domains, but it was not delivered as four independent modules. The structure was progressive, with each week building on the last. The four were Ayurveda and traditional healing, public health systems, artificial intelligence in healthcare, and data science. Each carried its own weight and its own faculty, but the design intent was that they would speak to each other.

Ayurveda was the most personally significant of the four. India’s classical medical system, one of the oldest continuously practised in the world, gave Mr. Baranov a direct point of professional dialogue. His background as a traditional healing practitioner meant he arrived with a framework for non-allopathic, holistic medicine already in place. Faculty at the Faculty of Ayurved at Parul University took him through the philosophy of Prakriti and Vikriti, the three-Dosha framework, herbal pharmacology, preventive care through lifestyle and diet, and the institutional structure through which Ayurveda is taught, licensed, and regulated in India today. The conversation was practitioner-to-practitioner. He was not learning Ayurveda from scratch. He was holding it up against what he already knew and asking the comparative questions a working clinician would ask.

Public health gave him a systemic lens on the Indian healthcare segment. The Faculty of Public Health exposed him to how India organises and runs healthcare across a population exceeding one billion, from primary health centres at the grassroots to policy frameworks at the national level. Coming from Russia’s very different public health architecture, the comparative dimension was the point. He worked through disease prevention strategies, community health interventions, and the question of how healthcare access is operationalised at the scale India requires.

AI in healthcare and data science were deliberate additions to the curriculum rather than afterthoughts. Both fields are reshaping public health practice globally, and Parul positioned them as practical tools that Mr. Baranov could take back into his work in Russia. He was introduced to AI applications in healthcare diagnostics, patient data management, epidemiological modelling, and public health surveillance systems. Data science modules gave him working approaches to analysing large health datasets in ways that inform policy and practice. The pitch was not theoretical. It was equipping a practitioner with tools he would actually use. Subsequently, he even figured out and explored how different master level courses, such as Master of Surgery (Ayurved) – Prasuti & Stri Roga and Master of Surgery Ayurved in Shalakya Tantra, ensure exposure at all levels. If you are looking forward to having a progressive career in Ayurveda, delay not and book your sit right away.

The programme broke into three distinct phases, each serving a different purpose, each documented in the personalised booklet handed to Mr. Baranov on arrival.

• Phase one: The Global Discovery Programme. A 14-day summer school that worked as both academic orientation and cultural onboarding. International students from across the campus were brought together for an interdisciplinary introduction to the breadth of learning at Parul, designed so that arrivals could find their feet inside the institution before specialised programmes began.
• Phase two: AICTE Faculty Development Programme. A 28-day institutional training run under the framework of the All India Council for Technical Education. Mr. Baranov attended a six-day selective portion, immersed in the methodologies, research frameworks, and pedagogical approaches that Indian higher education uses internally. He received a certificate on completion. The phase gave him a meta-level view of how Indian academia thinks about knowledge creation and transmission, the kind of perspective that is rarely available in a standard student curriculum.

Phase three: The dedicated Public Health engagement plan. The substantive core of the four months. A week-by-week schedule with defined modules, learning objectives, and faculty assignments, co-developed by Mr. Dsouza and the relevant faculty members and documented in a personalised booklet prepared exclusively for him. Every venue, every timing, every contact person, all of it laid out in a single document on day one.

If one element of Mr. Baranov’s programme stood out from the rest, it was the Ayurveda engagement. The reason was not the subject. It was how the faculty had been chosen.

Most international students who come to Parul to learn Ayurveda are encountering the subject for the first time. The faculty rotation that suits a beginner does not suit a practitioner, and CIRR knew it. Mr. Dsouza spent time before Mr. Baranov’s arrival mapping his background, his existing knowledge base, his clinical interests, and the questions he wanted answered. Faculty were then selected specifically for their ability to meet a fellow practitioner at his level. The Department of Ayurved at Parul University has the institutional depth to make that kind of targeted selection possible. The Indian regulatory framework around Ayurveda, governed by the Ministry of AYUSH, gives India one of the few national-scale traditional medicine ecosystems in the world, and Parul University sits inside it as one of the major teaching institutions.

The result was a learning environment that worked as comparative dialogue rather than one-way instruction. The faculty took him through the Indian framework around three Doshas, the role of diet and lifestyle in preventive care, the pharmacology of herbal and plant-based therapies, and the regulatory and educational infrastructure that surrounds Ayurvedic practice in modern India. Mr. Baranov brought the corresponding frame from his own traditional healing background. The conversation moved both ways. The professors got something out of it, too. That kind of exchange is what CIRR is trying to create whenever a student profile makes it possible, and it is usually only possible when the student arrives already operating professionally in the relevant field.

I am very grateful for this opportunity because I made a lot of friends here, and I gained knowledge. I am very much impressed by how India works in public health and education. PU also impressed me very much. I want to thank all the people who were there, who helped me, and thank you again. Love this country and will remember it for a long time.
Mr. Iaroslav Baranov, at the Inbound Semester Exchange and Internship Program Farewell Ceremony 2026

For a 20-year-old undergraduate exchange visitor, it tends to mean lab work and demonstrations. For Mr. Baranov, it meant something considerably more substantive. He observed Indian healthcare in operational settings through external visits coordinated by the Public Health Department and the AICTE Faculty Development Programme. He visited companies and healthcare institutions outside the campus and asked practitioner-level questions in those settings. He worked on academic projects that the faculty assigned, including designing modules and building working models from the material he was learning. His extensive final report was itself a hands-on exercise, synthesising four months of input into a coherent reflective document.

The most telling form of hands-on engagement, though, ran in the opposite direction. Mr. Baranov gave outputs to Indian students. He was integrated into student groups, led classroom activities, and shared his clinical experience and his perspective as a practitioner from a different country. That kind of contribution requires real mastery of the material being shared. It also represents the most authentic version of an international exchange, where the visiting student stops being a recipient of institutional programming and starts being a resource for the local community. CIRR sees this transition as a marker that the programme has actually worked.

Academic engagement was deliberately not the whole programme. CIRR treats cultural immersion as part of the learning, not as time off from it.

Mr. Baranov was included in every major university event during his stay. The standing CIRR policy is that any international student on campus, regardless of programme or duration, gets folded into the events calendar. For him, that meant the Vadodara Fashion and Design Festival (VFDF), the World Science Day exhibition (where he was visibly engaged and curious, shown around by his buddy), and the other campus events that fell during his four months. The intent is exposure. Students go back to their home institutions able to describe in concrete terms how a large Indian multidisciplinary university actually functions, not just what their own specialised programme involved.

Cultural excursions were planned as a dedicated component, not as bolt-ons. An organised two-day trip took international students to Udaipur, a city that delivered an unusually direct immersion in Rajasthani heritage, cuisine, architecture, and craftsmanship. A visit to Poicha Temple gave students a first-hand encounter with Hindu religious tradition, including the evening laser-light show that the temple is known for. A trip to the Statue of Unity was student-planned, a detail Mr. Dsouza highlighted because it indicated the student cohort had developed enough confidence and curiosity to drive its own itinerary by that point. On academic-free weekends, students were permitted to travel independently to Goa (where Parul operates its own campus), Ahmedabad, and Mumbai, with prior permission recorded in their booklets.

After 5 PM, the daily structure opened up. Yoga, meditation, gym, sports facilities. These are not treated as recreation. CIRR positions them as part of the student’s capacity to absorb what they are learning during the day, which is how anyone who has done a four-month intensive programme will tell you it actually works.

Every international student at Parul gets paired with a current Parul University student as a buddy from the day they arrive. For Mr. Baranov, the buddy was deployed for the first two days. Once he had familiarised himself with the campus layout, the administrative processes, and the rhythm of daily life, the buddy stepped back. From that point on, he was walking the campus independently, exploring on his own terms, attending events at his own pace.

The buddy duration is calibrated student by student. Mr. Shunya Akizuki, who came from Kyorin University in Japan for a one-month medical clerkship and had limited English proficiency, was assigned a buddy for the full duration of his stay because the language dynamic and the clinical environment made continuous support genuinely useful. The model adjusts to the student, not the other way around.

Mr. Baranov’s programme was distinctive in its content, but the CIRR model that built it is not a one-off. Two other international students were on campus during overlapping periods, each with their own tailor-made programme.

Mr. Isaac Castro arrived from Artevelde University in Belgium on 16 February for a course in Business and Management. His programme was unusual in placement. Instead of being embedded in a corporate or industrial host, he was placed inside the CIRR office itself as an intern, working directly alongside Mr. Dsouza. He delivered a LinkedIn profile-building workshop to a group of forty to forty-five final-year students, a session he planned and ran himself. He developed a dummy software tool for the university as part of a project assignment. He produced a research paper analysing how international Parul University is, conducting surveys and interviews across departments and student groups to support the analysis. Mr. Dsouza described him as someone who went to different faculties, different students, different departments, and did the work substantively.

Mr. Shunya Akizuki came from Kyorin University in Japan for a one-month medical clerkship that ended on 5 June. Because his stay was shorter, his programme was structured day by day rather than week by week.

His clinical rotation moved through four departments in sequence: Pediatrics in week one, Emergency Medicine in week two, Neurosurgery in week three, and Respiratory Medicine and Cardiothoracic Surgery in week four. Alongside the rotations, he completed a three-day Advanced Skills and Simulation Centre training at Pragya Lab, run jointly with Indian MBBS students, and received a formal certificate on completion. He was also preparing to run a Japanese language and culture session for the campus community before he left, a reciprocal contribution that fits the CIRR principle that international students are not only receivers of knowledge but contributors to it.

The three students together demonstrate something the source repeatedly comes back to. CIRR does not run an off-the-shelf international programme. It runs a model where each student’s background, profession, language proficiency, and academic interests shape what gets built for them. Three different countries, three different disciplines, three different programme structures, three different durations. Same underlying design philosophy.

The quality of experience CIRR delivers starts well before students arrive. It starts at the institutional level, when senior CIRR staff travel to universities abroad to attend international education events, present Parul’s programmes, and build relationships with partner institutions. Partner universities then identify and put forward interested candidates. The candidates are not automatically accepted. Every prospective student is interviewed by the CIRR team before confirmation.

The eligibility criteria fall into three working areas. English communication ability matters because the academic delivery happens in English, even when Mr. Dsouza adapts around language limitations. Academic performance, including CGPA, matters because the programmes are intellectually substantive. But the third criterion is the one that tends to be decisive. Students have to be able to articulate logical, meaningful objectives for the visit. CIRR is not interested in students who want to visit India. It is interested in students who know what they want to learn and can explain how that learning connects to their academic or professional trajectory. Mr. Dsouza was direct about it: outcomes and good objectives have to be completed by the student, so they get something substantive out of the programme. Everything that follows the interview, the curriculum design, the faculty selection, the activity planning, and the cultural programming is built on what that initial conversation surfaces.

Every international student who passes through CIRR is, in a real sense, more than a student. They are a node in a deliberately constructed network of institutional relationships.

The pattern goes like this. A student from Russia, Belgium, or Japan arrives at Parul. They experience the institution at close range and in depth across four weeks, eight weeks, or four months. They go home as ambassadors, not formally but authentically, telling peers and faculty about what they found. Individual impressions accumulate. Over time, those impressions turn into institutional relationships that send more students, host visiting faculty, and eventually formalise into partnership agreements. Mr. Dsouza cited the partnership with Humber College in Canada as an example of where this can lead. What started as an introduction at an international education event has become a fully established exchange partnership with students moving in both directions, faculty knowing each other, and a relationship with substance and history.

CIRR also works in the other direction. Parul University’s faculty are sent abroad to teach at partner institutions, present at international conferences, and represent the university in academic communities outside India. Visiting professors from partner institutions are hosted on campus through separately coordinated programmes. The intent is not a one-way flow of students into India but a genuine exchange in which both institutions and both academic communities benefit. The Iaroslav Baranov programme, the Isaac Castro internship, and the Shunya Akizuki clerkship are the visible, human face of that broader infrastructure.

Parul University holds NAAC A++ accreditation with a CGPA of 3.55 and sits in the QS World University Rankings 1001 to 1100 band for Asia 2026. The institution hosts more than 6,000 international students across its programmes, with active partnerships across more than 120 foreign universities.

CIRR is the office that operates inside that larger international footprint, handling the inbound programmes that bring students like Mr. Baranov, Mr. Castro, and Mr. Akizuki to Vadodara, and coordinating the outbound mobility programmes that send Parul students and faculty abroad. The Indian framework that supports Mr. Baranov’s Ayurveda engagement runs through the Ministry of AYUSH at the national level, giving Indian Ayurvedic education a regulatory and institutional depth that few other countries match.