Documentation of the medicinal herbs

1). Intervention:

• To conserve, identify, Sustain, and Cultivate herbal plants in local habitat.
• To encourage the practice of traditional vaidyaki through vaidyas in the region where health facilities are not easily available.
• To built a platform for vaidyas to share their knowledge with each other and learning through each other experiences.
• To promote herbal treatment as an alternative to the use of Allopathic medicine which are generally costly, to the hard and inaccessible terrains of mountain society for healthy and better living standard.

Backdrop :

Hilly terrain is inaccessible to good doctors. But the availability of vaidyas is visible widely in mountain society, mostly places that stand inaccessible by road. Sharing of experiences with other vaidyas shall benefit their skills and use vaidyaki practice effectively. Thus there is also a need to promote growing awareness on the relevance and use of herbal medicines to benefit the farmers/peoples from using herbal medicines as an alternate to allopathic medicines for treatment.

Encouraging practice of traditional vaidyaki by willing hilly people, shall aid the mountain society in encouraging them to preserve, promote and cultivate herbal medicine at their habitat.

Documentation of medicinal herbs provided an exposure on use of single herb in many ways to all the practicing vaidyas by sharing good knowledge on different herbal medicine, which is slowly diminishing. Their gained knowledge would thus result into benefiting the mountain society at large as they would be able to address local health issues with more ease, gained knowledge and spread awareness to the mountain society in preserving and cultivating the herbal plants in their area.

This awareness on the significance of use of herbal medicines shall motivate the mountain people to:
# Protect their bio-diversity, forests
# Watch and discourage the local traders from illegally trading the herbal medicines from their forest cover.

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2). Activity Description:

The program has been enabled through valuable guidance of Dr.A.N.Purohitji, Dehradun.

The project initiated by designing documentation formate for documenting practice of Vadiyas. Traditional Medical Practitioners (Vadiyas) were contacted in different watersheds of the region. By our humble gesture in facilitating them, their practices, methods adopted for cure were recorded. A sample of the Medicinal herb was taken with permission (Herb on which they practiced) for our procedural study and records.

The herbal document was further send to Scientific institutions to identify the herbs, its botanical name and enlist its values. HRDI, Dehradun facilitated scientific input with provision of support from HAPPRC, H.N.B.Garhwal Univertisity & the Wild Life Institute (WLI), Dehradun for identification of herbal propertise through scientific mechanism. Dr.B.P.Nautiyal, HAPPRC and Dr.Sekhar Anand (WLI) provided technical inputs for procedural documentation. The document prepared is scientifically preserved in our herbarium.

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3). Benefits/Achievements:

a). Qualitative benefits:
• Numerous Herbaceous plants could be recorded through this noble activity.
• This rich information has been integrated with scientific inputs from research institutions. The activity has a credible finding.
• The documentation has encouraged the government to note the contribution of Traditional Medical Practitioner and have recognized their services to the society in the mountains.

b). Quantitative:

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