The natural resources used by Indian systems of medicine are plants, animals, metals and minerals. India needs to build a national repository of these resources, which can serve to provide reference standards on the identity of the resources for national and international use.

1. Bio Cultural Herbarium & Raw-drug Library
FRLHT has initiated the country's first medicinal plant herbarium. The FRLHT herbarium provides reliable cross-linkages between local and traditional names used in medical literature and botanical names so that it could be accessed not only by botanists but also by lay persons and by traditional physicians. The herbarium acts as an information source for Indian medicinal plants, particularly on botanical identity, distribution, habit, habitat preferences, ethno-botany, use and method of usage, available variations, threat status, related conservation studies etc.

The FRLHT herbarium houses 35,000 voucher specimens comprising of 2096 species spread across 150 families. These have been collected from peninsular India, North West, North East and Andaman regions (Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Jammu & Kashmir in North West Himalayas, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Assam, Mizoram & Nagaland in North East India). The Raw-drug library has 1088 raw drug samples from 360 medicinal plant species obtained from market surveys carried out in 10 major and minor trade centres in India. The number of raw drug samples from authentic botanical sources currently stands at 200 from 132 species.

Herbarium collections across different medicinal systems

Collection of Herbarium	No. of Species Used	Status as on 1/4/02	2002-03 (total target 100 spp.)	2003-2004 (out of total target of 300 spp.)	2004-05* (total target 500 spp.)	Status (in %)
Sps of Ayurveda	1769	695	50	83	90	918 spp.(51.9 )
Sps of Folk	4671	337	73	239	180	829 spp. (17.8)
Sps of Homeopathy	482	68	9	24	2	103 spp. (21.4)
Sps of Siddha	1121	383	38	64	5	490 spp. (43.8)
Sps of Gso-Rig-Pa (Tibetan)	279	109	10	24	1	144 spp. (51.7)
Sps of ani	751	313	19	41	5	378 spp. (50.3)
Traded Medicinal Plants Sps	915	262	30	70	30	392 spp. (43)

2. Virtual Herbarium
FRLHT has initiated a virtual herbarium of medicinal plants of India and Raw-Drug Repository to provide access to authentic digitized information through World Wide Web. The virtual herbarium will have plant images with associated data. This centralised source of plant images will serve botanical researches, as well as anyone with need for correctly identified plant images linked to authentic information. This will not only save time but also help reduce expenditure and energy while reducing the physical damage to the herbarium sheets through repeated handling.

3. Repository of Metals and Minerals
In 2004, FRLHT has added a wing on metals and minerals. About 80 metals and minerals are reportedly used by the Indian systems of medicine. 28 such samples of metals and minerals have been accessed thus far. This will also provide a glossary of Rasashastra, the science Indian alchemy with a special reference to medicine, correlated to appropriate geological names.

↓ Highlights ↓