Barefoot botanists’ are the mainstay of a drive to preserve
and record medicinal plants in Maharashtra. Aishwarya Mavinkurve gets up close and personal

BACK TO BASICS: Barefoot botanists on a tour of a medicinal plant garden

Rauvolfia serpentina is quite a mouthful for the unlettered Baba Mangdya, but the 62-year-old from Ukhalapani in Nandurbar district in north Maharashtra is slowly getting accustomed to the Latin name for the medicinal herb he knew as sarpagandha. Ask him what the herb is used for, and he’ll tell you just how its root can be used to cure stomach aches.

Mangdya, who shares his knowledge about sarpagandha and other traditional medicinal herbs with Gokul Khandway from Gullarghat in Amravati district and the motley group — some in white caps and dhoti, others in forest department khakis — squatting on the floor in the small room at the Centre for Experiential Learning in Narangi village, Raigad district, are barefoot botanists.

They come from all parts of Maharashtra — from Toranmal in northern Nandurbar district to Amboli in Sindhudurg district in the south and from Amba in the western district of Raigad to Gadmauli in Gadchiroli in the east — with medicinal herbs pressed carefully between newspaper sheets to take part in a novel workshop conducted by the Medicinal Plant Conservation Centre.

The MPCC — a 21-month-old joint venture of the Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Tradition, Bangalore, the Maharashtra forest department, the UNDP-supported Rural Communes and the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests — is leading an ambitious statewide drive to document and conserve medicinal plants and local traditional knowledge. The mainstay of the rural healthcare support system, around 8,000 species of medicinal plants face an uncertain future as much because of deforestation as a demand created by the sudden popularity of Ayurveda preparations in the urban market.

The MPCC’s project aims at the ‘in situ’ conservation (conservation of plants in their natural surroundings) and sustainable utilisation of medicinal plants. As most medicinal plants are found in the forest habitat, the involvement of the state forest department, which has identified and established 13 Medicinal Plant Conservation Areas (MPCAs) across 12 districts of Maharashtra, is central.

‘‘The in situ conservation aims at preserving the gene pool of these medicinal plant species in areas selected across vegetational, altitudinal, agro-climatic zones and forest types. Each of the 13 MPCAs is about 200 to 300 hectares in area, in relatively undisturbed patches of the forest. Six of them are either in national parks or sanctuaries while the rest are in reserved forests’’, says Satish Elkunchwar, project director, MPCC, Pune. An arch and statuettes of ancient ayurved practitioners, a demonstration plot and nursery form part of each MPCA.

For the sake of sustainability, villages bordering the MPCAs and NGOs have been involved in the programme. In the second phase of the project — that of detailed botanical documentation including collection of basic ecological data — two field botanists conducted surveys along with the ‘barefoot botanists’, mainly residents of the MPCA village who could identify local plant species and their traditional medicinal uses.

Says field botanist Raghunandan Velankar, ‘‘Three barefoot botanists were selected from each MPCA and through intensive training in the first workshop, learnt to identify medicinal plants and note down information on them in a specified format, besides herbarium techniques.’’

Initially, though, the project botanists had to face resistance in some areas. ‘‘At Pitezari in Bhandara district, the local management committee set up a flour mill in the village as their nearest flour mill was 25 kms away. At Sasupada village, near Vasai, when women were told that they could tap a perennial hill-top water source — then used by illicit liquor makers — to raise a nursery, the women got together and busted the illicit liquor racket’’, says Elkunchwar.

Some barefoot botanists were so enthused by the training, they started their own nurseries of medicinal plants. Says an enthusiastic Motilal Lohonkare of Michgaon village, ‘‘Now we villagers have taken it up on our own to plant a garden of medicinal plants in a 1.5 hectare plot in the village. We all put in voluntary labour (shramdaan) for the project.’’

The Rs 80-lakh project continues till June 2002, though Elkunchwar hopes funding from an alternate source will keep the project going in the various MPCAs.

By then, perhaps, Mangdya will have mastered the pronunciation of rauvolfia serpentina.

The Foreign Hand GATEWAY TO HEALTH: An MPCA entrance In February this year, MPCC and FRLHT conducted a workshop to assess the threat to selected medicinal plants in Maharashtra. Of the 51 selected plants, two were described as critically endangered, 14 were put on the endangered list, and 10 in the vulnerable categories list. Eighteen of these 26 endangered medicinal plant species are found in the MPCAs. To explain the threat, Khandway makes an example of the plant, Chlorophytum borivillianum, known locally as safed musli and used as an aphrodisiac. ‘‘Till about five years ago, the safed musli was found everywhere, like grass. Today because the whole plant is being uprooted (ignorantly for use in medicinal preparations), it has become difficult to find in the forest’’, he says. The same is the story for the Nothopodytes nimmoniana, locally known as narkya. Says Bapu Gurav, a barefoot botanist from Koynanagar, ‘‘The thekedar told me the narkya was used against cancer. We weren’t aware of this earlier. Now the demand for narkya has risen so much, entire plants are uprooted.’’