The National Medicinal Plants Board (NMPB) has proposed setting up of a resource centre for Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathic (AYUSH) medicines and medicinal plants in the North East India to help improve the healthcare infrastructure of the region.
The resource centre, to be established at Government Ayurvedic College, Guwahati, is aimed to disseminate more of its funds and schemes to the North Eastern states. The centre will act as a coordinator with the state government by sensitizing them about the schemes of Department of Ayush including NMPB, according to Board sources. Lately, the Board has called for expression of interest (EOI) from interested parties of organisations to set up the resource centre.

The resource centre would have the onus to create a database of Ayush institutions and stakeholders in the region and to follow up with State Governments on the schemes and projects under implementation. The centre also has to undertake the publicity of the schemes and programmes of Department of Ayush through print and electronic media and any other work that may be assigned by the NMPB.

Initially, the board is planning to establish the centre for a period of two years with provisions for further extension after a review at the end of the second year. The North-Eastern region comprising of Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura is inhabited by a large number of tribals of various ethnic groups. The centre will help cultivation, collection and preservation of medicinal plants through providing government funded schemes and will support the industry to explore the vast medicinal plant repository, said the source.

According to a study conducted by some team of scientists in Department of Biotechnology and the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, in 2007 showed that the people of the region use at least 65 plants belonging to 38 families to treat malaria. Different plant parts such as the leaf, root, bark and fruit and in some cases the whole plant were used for making the herbal preparations. Of the 65 plants, 21 were found to be used in the form of a decoction. The study also indicated that most of the preparations made for curing malaria were derived from single plant sources.

Sources also point out that the importance of plants in the region, with wide geographical and climatic diversity, has been focused on collection and evaluation of their valuable constituents only in the past decade.

The Board officials informed that the EOI should be submitted by interested parties or organisations along with financial bid so as to reach on or before 30th March 2009.