Commercially important medicinal plants of North East India and their current applications – A review

Abstract

North East (NE) India is one of the ‘biodiversity hotspots’ of the world supporting about 50% of India’s biodiversity. In the sparse to dense forests across alpine to tropical climatic conditions, the NE region has a vast distribution of medicinal plants. The present study has compiled and enlisted the wide range of medicinal plants used by different ethnic communities along with the highly traded medicinal and endemic plant species of superior quality attributes in the region. The results are derived from an extensive review of information published in different research papers including those in books, journals, public domain documents of government agencies, NGOs and business and trade databases. The number of important species used in traditional healthcare systems of the different sister states of NE India ranges from 400 to 952 and out of these, the number of different commercially promising species ranges from 7 to 14 species. Thirty-seven species of medicinal plants in NE India are identified to have importance in the national and international trade of medicinal plants and products and most of these are harvested from the wild. Despite of rich heritage and large plant diversity, the herbal drugs market of NE India has not grown at the pace observed the mainland India’s herbal drug trade. Poor infrastructure in terms of quality control and quality assurance, GLP-compliant laboratories for herbal drugs, constraints of accessibility to the region, widespread collection of the medicinal herbs from the wild coupled with lack of sustainable harvesting and package of practices for domestic cultivation of medicinal herbs are issues need to be addressed in future for exploring maximum benefit to the economy of the region from medicinal plant resources.