Union Labour and Sports Minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Thursday, 25 June 2026, shared a video showing volunteers of the MY Bharat platform carrying Prime Minister Narendra Modi's public health message on reduced cooking-oil consumption to Maan village in Ladakh, one of the remote settlements covered under the Vibrant Villages Programme.

Posting on X, Mandaviya wrote: 'प्रधानमंत्री श्री @narendramodi जी का खाने में 'कम तेल' इस्तेमाल करने का संदेश #MYBharat के Volunteers हमारे 'Vibrant Villages' तक पहुंचा रहे हैं।' — translated: 'MY Bharat volunteers are taking Prime Minister Narendra Modi's message of using less oil in food to our Vibrant Villages.' The location tag identified the site as Maan village, Ladakh.

Context

Prime Minister Modi has periodically promoted simple dietary and fitness habits as part of a broader national wellness push, most visibly through the Fit India Movement launched in August 2019. Reducing cooking-oil intake is among the behavioural nudges the government has sought to mainstream through community-level outreach. The latest video suggests that message is now being carried into geographically remote and strategically sensitive border areas.

Maan village lies in Ladakh, the Union Territory that shares borders with both China and Pakistan. Its inclusion in the Vibrant Villages Programme makes it a focal point for government welfare and outreach activities.

Policy Backdrop

The Vibrant Villages Programme was announced in the 2022-23 Union Budget to provide comprehensive infrastructure, services, and livelihood support to select border villages in northern India. The scheme targets settlements that have historically lagged in connectivity and public services, with the twin goals of improving quality of life and checking outward migration from border areas.

MY Bharat — formally the Mera Yuva Bharat platform — is a youth volunteer initiative overseen by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, which Mandaviya currently heads. It channels young volunteers into community development tasks, making it a natural vehicle for grassroots health-awareness campaigns.

Stakeholders and Impact

The primary beneficiaries are border villagers in Ladakh who receive health messaging that would otherwise require dedicated public-health infrastructure to deliver. For the volunteers themselves, the engagement deepens civic participation in one of India's most challenging terrains. The convergence of MY Bharat's youth network with the Vibrant Villages Programme illustrates how the Centre is attempting to layer behavioural health outreach on top of existing infrastructure schemes.

Nutrition advocates have long argued that reducing edible-oil consumption can lower the risk of cardiovascular disease, a concern relevant across income groups. Carrying that message to remote villages, where dietary habits may be harder to influence through conventional media, represents an extension of the government's public-health communication strategy.

What's Next

Observers will watch whether the health-awareness component becomes a formalised part of Phase-II of the Vibrant Villages Programme, and whether parliamentary questions surface on the convergence of youth-volunteer schemes with nutrition outreach along the border. If the Ladakh pilot is documented and scaled, it could serve as a template for similar health-messaging drives in other border Union Territories and states. The broader question is whether such volunteer-led nudges translate into measurable dietary shifts in communities that have limited access to processed-food alternatives in the first place.