Introduction

The Industrial demand for the medicinal plant resources is rising world wide on account of the growing herbal sector engaged in production of herbal health care formulations, herbal cosmetic products as well as herbal nutritional supplements. In India, nearly 9,500 herbal manufacturing units are registered with the Department of AYUSH, Government of India. These along with a multitude of unregistered cottage level herbal units depent upon the continous supply of medicinal plant materials for manufacturing herbal formulations. In additions to the industrial consumption, significant quantities of medicinal plant resources are consumed in the country, especially in the rural areas, for self health care at the household levels as well as by the practicing local healers using Indian systems of medicine. Whereas more than 6000 plant species have been recorded in the codified and folk level health care traditions in the country, as per the on-going documentation efforts at FRLHT, the quantum of their consumption remains a matter of guesstimate. There are a number of medicinal plant species which are consumed in sizeable quantities and the wild populations of a number of such species are facing a serious threat of heavy decline in their wild populations and even extinction due to indiscriminate harvesting. Adequate species level data has been generally lacking.

To address this lack of data, the National Medicinal Plant Board of Government of India, supported a nation wide study to assess the demand and supply of medicinal plants in India by FRLHT during 2006-07. The outcome of this study has been published as “Demand and Supply of Medicinal plants in India" by D.K Ved and G.S Goraya of FRLHT in January 2008. In this study, a list of 960 medicinal plant species, constituting source of 1289 botanical raw drugs in trade in India, has been worked out along with an estimate of the annual demand of botanical raw drugs for the year 2005-06. The consolidated annual demand has been estimated at 3,19,500 MT (dry weight). The total annual demand consists of consumption by the herbal manufacturing units. (1,77.000 MT), consumption by the rural households (86,00 MT) and exports (56,500 MT).

Of the 960 traded medicinal plant species, 178 species have been assessed as consumed in volumes exceeding 100MT (dry weight) per year. The consolidated consumption of these 178 species accounts for about 80% of the total industrial demand of all medicinal botanicals in the country. Analysis of these 178 species by their major sources of supply reveals that 21 species (12%) are obtained from temperate forests, 70 species (40%) are obtained from tropical forests, 36 species (20%) are obtained largely or wholly from cultivations/plantations, 46 species (25%) are obtained largely from road sides and other degraded land use elements and remaining 5 species (3%) are imported from other countries.