Much of the country’s natural herbal wealth found traditionally in the wild has been lost for good, and the remaining is under severe threat, thanks to its indiscriminate and unregulated exploitation. The demand for herbal medicinal and aromatic products is growing rapidly by 15 to 20 per cent a year. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has estimated that over two-thirds of the world’s population relies, fully or partially, on traditional systems of medication. Besides, nearly 80 per cent of the raw material for all kinds of medicines, including modern drugs, comes from the herbs.
The use – and hence the demand for – herbal products in India is relatively greater, since a bulk of the country’s population depends on ancient herb-based therapies, especially in the rural belt, either by choice or because of the high cost and inadequate infrastructure of the modern health care system. The country’s natural herbal resources are under stress also because 90 to 95 per cent of the drugs and other herbal products are manufactured from plants sourced from the wild. Worse, most of these herbs are harvested in a destructive manner, largely by uprooting the plants, to access their roots, barks and other parts that possess therapeutic properties.
The Anand (Gujarat)-based Directorate of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (DMAPR) reckons that nearly 180,000 tonnes of herbs are used annually in India to cater to the Rs 4,000-crore domestic market and exports valued at over Rs 810 crore.
The need, therefore, is to tap the natural herbal resources judiciously and in a sustainable manner, and also to supplement the supplies through farm-produced medicinal and aromatic plants. Fortunately, the country has enormous potential to grow a wide variety of such plants, thanks to the varied agro-climatic conditions in different regions. Moreover, this sector presents great investment and business opportunities owing to relatively higher returns from herbal farming vis-à-vis other agricultural and horticultural produce. Realising this potential, prospective entrepreneurs have begun investing in setting up herbal farms and producing seeds and seedlings of medicinal plants. On the downside, the range of the farmed herbal plants is still rather narrow, limited to around 70-odd species, though the country is home to some 15,000 plant species that have therapeutic value.
A major constraint in herbal farming, according to DMAPR experts, is the want of superior and well-performing strains of medicinal plants. Though the herbal gardens maintain several useful medicinal and aromatic plant species, and even have their planting material for sale or sharing, the information about this is generally not readily available. This knowledge gap is now sought to be bridged through a web-based data bank on herbal gardens of India launched by DMAPR. It carries details of the plants available for supply in different herbal parks.
The portal (hosted on the website www.herbalgardenindia.org) is designed basically for two types of users – herbal garden curators and general users. Garden curators, designated under this initiative as nodal officers, are responsible for keeping the data up-to-date by adding, deleting or modifying the information related to their specific farms. These entries contain the details of the plant species, their scientific and common names, the quantity and quality of available plants and planting material and other relevant information. General users of this portal are basically end-users or growers of herbal plants. The portal, moreover, offers various search options to access information on plants available from the nearest and the most suitable sources.
About 120 herbal gardens located in different parts of the country have already registered themselves with this portal, listing information on about 1,500 medicinal and aromatic plants, including about 750 herbs, 350 tree species, 275 shrubs and 125 climbers.
Now that several farm research centres and agricultural universities, apart from DMAPR, have begun research and promotional work on herbs, this portal can prove handy to them to reach out to prospective herbal entrepreneurs. Wider dissemination of the herbal species will, obviously, help not only in conservation but also in the multiplication of the medicinal and aromatic plants for commercial use. The beneficiaries will be drug manufacturers, practitioners of traditional health care therapies and common people.
