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The current rate of destruction of floristic elements in India has rightly sounded warning signals about the possibility of losing not only the known medicinally important plant species but also the medicinally potential other species of plants.
The urgent need to study medicinal plants, in particular the Indian species, has been highlighted many a time, as detailed in the introduction to this volume.
THE NEED FOR DATABASES OF MEDICINAL PLANTS
Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani are well documented systems. On the other hand, the people living in India’s vast number of villages and the people of numerous small tribes living in the hills and other remote places, use plants as food and medicine. The unrecorded practices of these people, largely unknown outside the respective pockets, are less affected by civilisation and so form an important part of our country’s heritage. If we do not take urgent steps to consolidate this information, it would be lost to us for ever, since it is not recorded but is conveyed from generation to generation only by the word of mouth. This wealth of information, along with that is recorded, has also to be evaluated and incorporated into the systems of medicine in India.
An effective utilisation of any kind of information requires a systematic evaluation. One of the important reasons that have put the indigenous systems of medicine in a bad light is that a lot of unfounded claims have contaminated genuine practices that were tested for centuries. A thorough assessment of the efficacy of the various formulations and claims of the indigenous systems of medicine is essential. This can be achieved only when we consolidate all available information on the subject. Starting from Charaka and Sushrutha written in Samskrit around 300 BCE, to modern phytochemistry and pharmacology, information on Indian medicinal plants and medical practices is widely dispersed in thousands of publications. It takes
a lot of labour and time to find answers even to simple questions relating to medicinal plants. We need to establish connections between the traditional medical practice and modern phytochemical and pharamacological research that has been conducted on a large number of Indian medicinal plants. In the current surge of interest on Indian medicinal plants, the number of people and institutions seeking information and advice increased many fold. Hence, there is an urgent need to consolidate and organise all available information on Indian medicinal plants and establish information centres for the use of the scientific community and the public.
Databases are structured and organised formats for the storage and retrieval of large bodies of information. With the advent of very powerful computer systems and efficient program packages, the utility of databases has increased many fold. Databases are an indispensable aspect of our present day life and activity. But a functional database requires a lot of time and energy in gathering and recording the basic information, which is the very flesh and blood of databases. Databases of the Indian medicinal plants are the most fundamental and urgent facility, needed by people interested in the indigenous systems of medicine and medicinal plants.
This book is a small contribution towards the creation of such a foundation that is essential for organising an operational and relational database of Indian medicinal plants.
REFERENCES
Ayensu, E.S. 1986. World medicinal plant resources. In Conservation for productive agriculture. (eds.) Chopra, V.L. and Khoshoo, T.N. ICAR, New Delhi.
Bannerman, R.H., Burton, J. and Wen-Chieh, C. 1983. (eds.) Traditional medicine and health care coverage. WHO, Geneva.
de Orta, Garcia. 1563. Portuguese os coloquies. Lisbon.
Kapoor, S.L. and Mitra, R. 1980. Herbal drugs in Indian pharmaceutical industry. NBRI, Lucknow.
Mohan Ram, H.Y. 1980. Exploration and improvement of medicinal plants. 67th session, section Botany. Indian Sci. Cong. Assn., Calcutta.
Penso, G. 1980. Inventory of medicinal plants used in different countries. WHO, Geneva.
Rheed, tot Drakestein, H. van. 1678-1693. Hortus Malabaricus. 12 vols. Amsterdam.
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