Forest Resources – An Ideal Alternative for Tribal Development and Health Care

Abstract

The Indian sub-continent is inhabited by 53 million tribal populations belonging to over 550 tribal communities that come under 227 linguistic groups. They inhibit varied geographic and climatic Zones of the country. Their vocation ranges from hunting, gathering, cave dwelling nomadics to societies with settled culture living in complete harmony with nature. Forests have been their dear home and totally submitted themselves to forest settings. Their relationship with the forest was symbolic in nature. They have been utilizing the resources without disturbing the delicate balance of the eco-system. Tribals thus mostly remained as stable societies and were unaffected by the social, cultural, material and economic evolutions that were taking place with the so called civilized societies. But this peaceful co-existence of the tribals has been disturbed in recent years by the interference in their habitats. Traditional communities living close to nature have, over the years acquired unique knowledge about the use of living biological resources. Modernisation, especially industrialization and urbanisation has endangered the rich heritage of knowledge and expertise of age old wisdom of the traditional communities. A study on the utilization of local tribals revealed that they hold precious knowledge on the specific use of a large number of agents of wild plant and animal origins, the use of many are hitherto unknown to the outside world. The tribal people are the real custodians of the medicinal plants and thus by using their talents they can be developed as real custodian of Health Care in Indigenous field.

The present paper explains how medicinal the knowledge of medicinal plants can prove to be an ideal alternative for tribal development especially in the area of Health Care.