The past century and a half has seen a major transformation in the practice of the Indigenous Systems of Medicine (Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, Tibetan & Homeopathy).  The days when the health care delivery was through the medicinal healers who themselves gathered the necessary herbs ? often after observing due rituals ? to prepare medicines for their patients are almost over.  Now the herbal raw material is available at the next door grocery shop or at specialized retail shops for use by the medicinal healers who would still prefer to prepare their own medicines.  At a larger scale, the herbal formulations, either prepared as per classical formulations or the proprietary ones, by thousands of manufacturing units across the country, are available from the pharmadies and chemist shops.  The Government of India while preparing the first Ayurvedic Formulary of India notes that ?the practice of the individual physician identifying drugs and preparing medicines himself for the use of his patients has been largely supplemented by the Pharmaceutical Industry? He (the practitioner) prefers to buy it straight from the market ? ?? (Anon, 1978.)

This  transformation in the practice of medicinal medical systems has resulted in a vibrant trade in medicinal plants and in the emergence of an entire new sector that can be appropriately named as ?Herbal Sector?.

This fast growing herbal sector has its roots in the very rich and diverse health care traditions of our country that include the codified systems like Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, Tibetan and Homeopathy on one hand and the largely oral folk traditions on the other.  These traditions, having evolved in the lap of Name, rely mainly on natural resources available in the surroundings with plants forming the major resource.  In Indian traditions, all the plants are considered to have medicinal properties.

?Jagatyevamanoushadham na kinchit

vidyate dravyam vasatnanartha yoga  yoh? ? Jivaka (Astanga Hriday SU. 9-10)

It literally means ?there is no plant in the world which is non-medicinal or which cann not be used as medicine?.  This means that all the 19,000 odd flowering plants recorded from India have potential medicinal properties.  However, even narrowing down this definition to the more practical one that categories only those plants as ?medicinal?, the medicinal use of which has been documented, India has some 6,000 odd igher plants (FRLHT Database) recorded as medicinal in the country, even as estimates of this figure vary from 2,500 (Chauhan, 1999) to 7,500 (Pushpagandan, 1995).

The major reason for this vast variation in estimates of the number of medicinal plant species in use in the country seems to be due mainly to the lack of any single consolidated list on the subject, even though state-wise or region-wise checklists of medicinal  plants are available for a few states. (viz. Himachal Pradesh (Chauhan, 1999), Shivalik Ranges in Haryana (Bhojvaid, 2003)  and Chhatisgarh (Anon., 2006).

Whereas most of these medicinal plants are used in the living folk health traditions, only a part of  this medicinal plant diversity is used in the codified systems of medicine, as every raw drug has to conform to strict traditional quality standards to be able to enter the Pharmocopoeias of these systems.  Since most of the herbal formulations are based on the classical formulae, the trade in botanicals is largely related to the medicinal plants species used in across the codified Indian Systems of  Medicine.  To work out the diversity of medicinal plants used in these codified systems, FRLHT compiled information about use of plants in various codified Indian Systems of Medicine & Western systems and collated it into consolidated checklist of plant species used in and across these systems.  This consolidated checklist contains 2400 botanical identities used in these systems.  System-wise analysis of this checklist is give below:

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