Traded medicinal plants of India
This portal is a collaboration between TDU & RBG Kew, and was developed in partnership with the Metastring Foundation and policy support from the National Medicinal Plant Board (NMPB) GoI. We are grateful to the British High Commission for their financial support.
Context :
India has an extraordinarily rich, living, evolving tradition using herbal remedies derived from over 6500 species of plants. The Indian government has legalized the traditional healthcare systems such as Ayurveda, Sowa Rigpa, Siddha and Unani whose materia medicas are based on overlapping indigenous plant species and pharmacologies. An astonishing number (~ 300,000) of plant based drug formulations are documented in the traditional literature for a wide range of simple and complex health conditions. The Indian Government’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (Traditional Knowledge Digital Library) seeks to protect the intellectual property inherent in these formulations. Western medicine has borrowed from such traditional phytotherapies over the last two centuries. However traditional health practices continue to play a vital role within India’s Public Health system through both institutional services as well as home remedies .
Current Issues :
The pharmaceutical, common and trade names that are employed to refer to medicinal plants and the products derived from them, are at times imprecise or ambiguous. Vernacular names of the medicinal species are used inconsistently in different parts of India and across disciplines. Scientific nomenclature offers universal standards to address nomenclature confusion and can remove misunderstanding and misuse by health professionals, commercial and regulatory bodies the world over.
The current inconsistency and imprecision in plant nomenclature hampers communication between individuals, companies and regulators. Data cannot be reliably shared among manufacturers, suppliers, practitioners and researchers in India. It hampers the authentication of plant materials and quality control of medicinal products and prevents comprehensive access to the international scientific literature on medicinal botanicals. A search with a non-updated scientific plant name in the US National Institute of Health’s Medical Publication Library will on average retrieve only 20% of the articles relating to that plant. Thus one may miss reliable access to vital safety and efficacy data from patient records and clinical trials and sometimes leads to ineffective regulation. Such issues prevent India from adequately protecting the IP embedded within its traditional knowledge systems or from engaging effectively with regulatory frameworks established for markets in the US or EU.
Solution :
This Portal directly addresses the above issues. TDU has a database of more than one lakh vernacular names in 12 Indian languages for 6500 medicinal plants. In this portal we map these names to a sound global scientific framework provided by RBG Kew (e.g. IPNI, WCVP and APG). Initially we provide terminological harmonization and scientific integrity of the names for 1178 plants recorded as being traded in India (Goraya, G. S. and Ved, D. K. (2017). Medicinal Plants in India: An Assessment of their Demand and Supply. National Medicinal Plants Board, Ministry of AYUSH, Government of India, New Delhi and Indian Council of Forestry Research & Education, Dehradun ). In future we plan to expand the current portal to include other relevant publications e.g. the adulterants, substitute / alternate species and the pharmacology of medicinal plant species in the pharmacopeia published by the Govt. of India.
This portal hosted by TDU enhanced with Kew data, will improve the integrity of natural product use andpromote data exchange between scores of Indian agencies and companies working with medicinal plants nationally and internationally. It will enable connectivity with domestic and international trade, health regulations and resource management.