The National Medicinal Plants Board (NMPB) is planning to support the Medicinal Plants Processing Clusters to reduce the high wastage of raw material that takes place due to poor processing practices which also impact quality.

The clusters will be supported with infrastructure for warehousing, drying, grading, storage and transportation as estimates say 30 per cent of the product is wasted in the absence of good processing practices. The proposal has been made based on the experience from the Agri-export Zones existing in Kerala and Uttarakhand for medicinal and aromatic plants.

The Board also has made several proposals to the Planning Commission for consideration and approval for the current five year plan, sources said. One of the proposals is for establishment of national and regional scientific repositories of raw drugs with their botanical and trade names along with their genetic, morphological, microscopic and phyto-chemical profiles as may be relevant for the purposes of their identification and authentication.

Another proposal is to conduct a comprehensive demand- supply study of medicinal plants in order to set priorities for conservation and cultivation of species. An all-India coordinated project to establish the taxonomic identity of controversial medicinal plants in trade, through systematic co-relation of descriptive identities given in traditional medical texts and subsequently through objectively verifiable markers using chromatography and DNA profiling is another proposal.

Other proposals included establishment of a reliable and dynamic data-base on the traded medicinal plants with trade names co-related to botanical and vernacular names of the materials in all languages;  programs on expanding the in-situ conservation network of traded and threatened species in their collaboration with State Forest Departments and joint forest management committees, including an all-India project for sustainable harvest of selected medicinal plants from the wild;  a coordinated R&D Programme focusing on high volume traded and exported species to develop appropriate technologies for scientific collection, drying, semi-processing and sterile packaging of medicinal plants using zero or low energy systems; and support for R&D on nursery techniques and multi-centric agro technologies for high priority traded species and establishment of a network of centres for supply of quality planting materials.