Afforestation and Conservation of Medicinal Plants :

After careful analyses, we found that afforestation of medicinal plants habitat and conservation of healer’s methodologies are interdependent. We observed that hundreds of medicinal plants were conserved in situ in the afforested area within five years. This encouraged us to move forward with this project to identify several healers and herbs around BCRT campus. We neither manufacture any drugs from plants nor sell them for commercial purpose. We focus on conservation of herbs and protect intellectual property rights of herbal healers. Since last four years, BCRT has established herbal nursery that exclusively propagates medicinal plants used by healers. The idea of medicinal plants nursery is not only to propagate the medicinal plants, but also increase the supply of plant material to meet the growing demands of healers. This helps the healers to easily access the plant and its parts to carryout their practice.

Herbal Healer’s Committee (HHC):

BCRT afforestation method has motivated the local community and local healers to act towards conservation of medicinal plants and forest. Apart from creating awareness among rural community about the importance of traditional medicines and herbal plants, we have also identified several herbal healers around BCRT campus. Subsequently, we established an Herbal Healer’s Committee (HHC) at the BCRT campus. The HHC’s main goal is to identify herbal healer’s problem and come out with possible solutions.

Based on our survey, more than 90% of herbal healers are illiterates and have not recorded their methodologies. We believe that lack of education and encouragement, healers have not been allowed to demonstrate their skill and knowledge to the outside world. Moreover, very few studies have carried out to document healer’s methodologies and herbs used in folklore medicine. Public/Government initiatives have not been undertaken to preserve this vanishing treasure. Therefore, BCRT has conducted various HHC meetings to address some the educational aspects that are lacking among herbal healers. BCRT distributed booklets to healers and encouraged them to record their herbs (like plant, its propagation, habitat, etc) and methodologies (like herbal mixture or formulations, number of success cases, etc) for future use.

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