Mann Ki Baat 139th Episode Flags 50 Crore e-Sanjeevani Calls

The 139th episode of Mann Ki Baat, the Prime Minister’s monthly radio programme, was aired on 25 October 2026. The Prime Minister opened by recalling that the broadcast began 12 years ago on the day of Vijayadashami and has not missed a month since, and he called it an occasion to salute the hard work and spirit of service of ordinary citizens.

Health: e-Sanjeevani and Arogya Mandirs

The largest figure in the episode came from health. The e-Sanjeevani telemedicine platform has by now carried roughly 50 crore tele-consultations. Patients in the remotest corners were named as proof: a child of the Jarawa tribe on Baratang Island in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands who had pneumonia, a man of about 60 in Kalpeni, Lakshadweep helped by a doctor sitting across the sea in Kavaratti, a woman facing pregnancy complications in Zanskar, Ladakh, and a boy with an ear infection in Peren, Nagaland. Nearly 1,90,000 Ayushman Arogya Mandirs are meanwhile growing into wellness centres for village panchayats.

Science: mapping the brain at IIT Madras

The Prime Minister spoke of the Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre he had opened at IIT Madras during a visit to Chennai earlier in the month. The centre has built a brain-imaging platform that makes high-resolution digital 3D pictures of the human brain, and it means to map 100 human brains in fine detail — called in the episode the first mission of its kind anywhere in the world. The computing is done on the Param Shakti supercomputer, and the data from the 100 brains will be opened up as a free resource for researchers in many fields.

Swadeshi, Khadi and millets

On Gandhi Jayanti this year the one-day sale of Khadi Gram Udyog goods went past ₹28 crore, about ₹1.5 crore more than a year earlier. Packaging carrying tribal art, brought out by tribal communities of Maharashtra under the Shabari Naturals label for honey, mahua, chironji and bamboo goods, has won Japan’s Good Design Award. Makhana from Purnia in Bihar now travels to Greece and arhar dal from Kalaburagi in Karnataka to the Maldives. On millets, the episode recalled that 2023 was observed as the International Year of Millets at India’s call, and that Kezoma village in Kohima, Nagaland took up millet farming again in 2024 after a gap of more than a decade and held its first millet festival in 2025.

The anniversaries just ahead

Three dates were put before listeners. 26 October is the birth anniversary of Maharishi Valmiki, after whom the airport at Ayodhya has been named. 31 October is Ekta Diwas, the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, when a Run for Unity is held across the country; the same day is the 100th birth anniversary of Narinder Singh Kapany, born in the Moga district of Punjab and known to the world as the Father of Fiber Optics. 4 November brings the 150th birth anniversary of Bhai Parmanand, a founding member of the Ghadar Party who was sentenced to Kala Pani, wrote of that imprisonment in his memoir, and later taught Bhagat Singh.