Documentation and Cataloguing of Plant Raw Drugs Traded in the Selected Markets of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, Southern India

Abstract

Herbal sector is growing at a fast pace catering to diverse needs of pharamaceuticals to nutraceuticals to cosmeticeuticals to plant extracts due to natural products and traditional medicine inclination world over. Trades of botanicals in the raw drug markets are diverse, complex, unregulated, opaque, fluctuating, unclear regulatory norms and implementation, lack of comprehensive documentation of market information and so on. Due to which, there is a cascading effect on the availability of the plant resources, which is affected by unscientific and destructive harvests along with certain species intrinsic factors.The doctoral study undertook ethnobotanical documentation of 6 raw drug markets of two states in southern India. This resulted in enumeration of 779 plant raw drugs comprising of 298 species, which are traded in two states. A ready reckoner comprising of botanical names, trade names, parts traded, field characters, botanical sources with authenticated information is shared as a catalogue. Such effort will facilitate the preparation of Market action and resource augmentation initiatives involving different stake holders in trade and manufacturers.