Welcome To Council For Tribal And Rural Development (CTRD)

A leading consortium of CBOs working on Community based Conservation of Medicinal Plants COUNCIL FOR TRIBAL AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT (CTRD) exists to maintain a balancing mechanism between economic development and biodiversity conservation in forest regions of Chhattisgarh and Orissa. The organization actively addresses and works on the challenges of Environment Conservation, Protection of Intellectual Property Right and Documentation of Indigenous Knowledge ensuring protocols of CBD and Biological Diversity Act. The programmes of the organization centre rounds elimination of poverty, improvement of quality of life of forest dwellers and biodiversity conservation.

Medicinal Plants provide livelihood support as well as medicine to well over 80% of forest dwelling communities in Chhattisgarh and Orissa. Protection and Conservation of rare and endangered medicinal plants is a serious concern. A good number of healers carry on promising local practices that render miraculous cure too many chronic diseases. But these practices are not legalized. These practices have vast opportunities to explore health tourism and fetch lucrative foreign investment in this sector. The examination of validity and usefulness medicinal plants is a serious concern. The rural communities need to be sensitized on harvesting and cultivation of rare and endangered medicinal plants. The issues of sustainable harvesting, cultivation techniques, growing medicinal plants for pharmaceutical and small scale processing industries are debated in many International and National Flora. The International trading standard for medicinal plants and integration of herbal medicine in National Health Policy pose serious concerns for policy makers.

Council for Tribal and Rural Development, a premier action research agency committed to research and action programmes on conservation, marketing and patending of Medicinal Plants has adopted following intervention programmes in its agenda.

• Growing medicinal plants in home gardens
• Propagation from seed or through vegetative propagation
• Cultivation of medicinal plants
• Packaging and storage of medicinal plants
• Use and efficacy of herbal medicines
• Orientation of local healers on prescription of accurate dosages
• Identifying and conserving endangered plant species
• Preserving and documenting traditional knowledge about medicinal plants

CTRD undertake action research projects covering base line data collection, orientation of stakeholders, organizing participatory training and research activities, empowerment of communities, evaluation and validation for effective implementation of above agenda at grass root.