Two large projects, viz., the centre of Excellence (CoE) program of the ministry of Environment & Forests, GoI, New Delhi, and the CCF –II project of the UNDP, New Delhi took up almost 50% of our staff’s time and energies, The FRLHT team worked on varied other projects to meet the institutional agenda.
Some of the noteworthy outputs by the different groups contributing to the institution’s vision and mission are the following:
- Outputs by the conservation Action and Research Group:Conducting 3 CAMP (Conservation Assessment and management prioritization) workshops for evaluating the threatened status of medicinal plants in orissa, Rajasthan and West Bengal; establishment of new MPCA’s (Medicinal Plants Conservation Areas) in 4 states and Medicinal Plants seed centers in 5 states; demonstration of a community manages program for sustainable harvesting of select medicinal plants in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh; preparation of community knowledge registers to document communities’ knowledge in 5 states; conduction of a series of community to community training (CTCT) programs.
- Outputs by the informatics Groups: Strengthening of the vernacular Nomenclature database on medicinal plants of India; the development of Geographical distribution atlas of prioritized Indian Medicinal Plants; the nation wide study on the demand and supply of medicinal plants and an insightful report from the study.
- Outputs by the Herbarium Group: Addition of 160 new species to the National Herbarium of medicinal plants and respiratory of raw drugs used in Indian system of medicine, as a result of several botanical surveys which has taken the herbarium accession to 2827 species.
- Outputs by the laboratory: Innovative efforts to ascertain the botanical identities of raw drugs and their substitutes, with the help of inter-cultural studies; comparative pharmacognostic and biological evaluation of select raw drugs using modern tools to interpret traditional knowledge.
