The Author is Ex- Professor & Former In-charge, Medicinal and Aromatic Plant Project,Bidhan Chandra Agricultural University, Kalyani, West Bengal, India

Ayurveda covers preventive, promotive and curative aspects of health care system. We are still dependent on nature for remedies from various ailments. This is reflected by the fact that the major medicines under ISM are plant based. At present there is a growing appreciation of this reality and the WHO, in setting their goal of “Health for All”, has advocated for the greater use of Indian Traditional Medicines to provide comparatively inexpensive and safe health care.

In Bengal, majority of the people still live in villages and they do not have access to modern allopathic health care system. In fact, the Government Hospitals and rural health centers are gradually shrinking for want of fund and infrastructure. For these rural people, there is genuine need for re popularizing and re strengthening the health care practices at the grass root levels with emphasis on household herbal remedies for common ailments like common cold, bronchitis, tonsillitis, diarrhea, constipations, oral hygiene etc.

Establishing contacts with rural people, it may be possible to make a list of common ailments of a particular area and to popularize the herbal cure for these ailments. Providing practical guidance for establishment of domestic herbal gardens through, self-help and co-operation and propagating the age old practices by involving practitioners of traditional medicines will strengthen the rural healthcare network.

It is also necessary to provide the rural population, especially the womenfolk, scientific training in identification and use of plants and plant parts, proper collection time and season, diagnosis of common diseases, storage and preparation to link rural physicians (Homoeopaths and Ayurveds) and the suffering people. In this manner, traditional physicians will also be benefited, as they will be assured of supply of authentic plant materials. Traditional knowledge is generated through beliefs, norms and observation of any society. It is the product of day to day activities based on continuously tested experiences.

This traditional knowledge in herbal medicines generated through years of observation and monitoring is specific to different regional locations and is being perpetrated generations after generation through verbal communication. West Bengal is a state of wide agro-climatic variations and different ethnic groups of people are found here. Simultaneously districts of Midnapore, Bankura, Purulia and West Dinajpur are inhabited by tribal people. Each such community has its own repository of traditional healthcare formulations. Since most of these ethnic communities are illiterate and they do not have their own scripts, these information about prescriptions, pharmacology, attitudes towards disease management remains unrecorded.

A lot of folk medicines has been ignored in the past, and people who knew about the resource plants are becoming few in number. Plant medicines, that are used in remote areas, specially by tribal peoples, are to be known, and examined with modern techniques. It is necessary to undertake survey work to collect the information regarding use of plants as folk medicines in different areas of Bengal. Even in recent past, the knowledge about the herbal plants and their therapeutic values were found in both urban and rural areas where people dealing with Ayurvedic Medicines were found. This tradition of passing over the knowledge as well as its extensive use in our health care system from generation to generation has become unpopular as rural people are becoming more and more dependent of allopathic treatment which is beyond their capacity economically and is also cause of unwanted side effects. Rapid deforestation leading to large scale loss of plant population and genetic diversity has resulted in loss of many valuable plants species. This loss not only degrades the environment but also generates ignorance and apathy of the rural mass about the importance of the surrounding medicinal plants, which, in turn, encourages indiscriminate, pilferage of these natural resources. Large scale demand for medicinal plants from the pharmaceutical companies, without any attempt to conserve or propagate them is responsible for vandalisatism of rural plant resources and enlargement of illegal trade sector. In a situation of growing raw materials scarcities the adulteration of expensive drugs with cheaper ones, use of improper ingredients, and careless procedures of preparation are all becoming evident. Absence of adequate information about the modern and scientific basis of Ayurvedic treatment is responsible for lack of confidence in the system in the minds of people at large who rush for alternate medicine that can be very expensive and at time hazardous to health because of side effect.

With this background, an integrated approach to rural primary health care system through sustainable and self-sustainable application of Ayurvedic practices is suggested in this paper. It is proposed to implement this work through collection of information from rural people their common primary health problems and to prescribe Ayurvedic remedies through regular interaction among villagers and resource persons from different related fields. The project also aims at carrying the message of self-supporting health care possibilities by organizing workshops, group meetings, video shows and encouraging villagers to generate their own medicinal plant resources through in-situ and ex-situ conservation of useful medicinal plants. The internal resources will help in the preparation of prescribed Ayurvedic drugs in a particular area to fight for general ailments. It will also endeavor to develop a nursery to supply quality plant material to the targeted population. It is necessary to shortlist medicinal plant species, which are required for herbal medicines prescribed for common ailments identified through survey work. Arrangement for growing these plants in a central herbal plant garden as well as in homestead lands of each village may be made. Only those plants will be cultivated which are of use in that village. Cultivation of medicinal plants in the herbal gardens has to be made by following the practices of organic farming as far as possible maintaining strict vigilance on the quality aspect demanded in the modern pharmaceutical industry. Products will be suitably processed to add value to them. Emphasis on large scale cultivation may be given only to those plants, which are in demand for the local health care.