Dr. Maguni Charan Behera
Retired Professor of Tribal Studies
Email: mcbehera1959@gmail.com
A National Conference on “Harvesting and Sustainable Utilisation of Medicinal Plants for Farmers and Traditional Healers” was held on 2nd and 3rd November 2025 in Bhubaneswar. The event was organised by the Central Ayurvedic Research Institute in collaboration with Vivekananda Kendra AICYAM, Bhubaneswar. A large number of traditional practitioners and scientists of national repute participated in the programme.
The panel discussion focused on the preventive aspects of health. Traditional practitioners highlighted the threats posed by deforestation, which endanger the availability of medicinal plants, and spoke about their efforts to cultivate and preserve these plants for the future. Scientists, on the other hand, discussed the ongoing activities and future plans of their research institutions. However, few speakers directly addressed the central theme of the session.
During the question–answer session, a lady scientist candidly admitted the limitations of current institutional approaches but insightfully remarked that true prevention begins with our food habits—an area where we have become slaves to the market, moving away from traditional dietary wisdom.
And perhaps one may ask—isn’t that true?
We are told time and again that “prevention is better than cure.” But today’s world seems to have turned this wisdom upside down. We spend thousands curing what we could have prevented with a handful of green leaves growing wild beside our homes.
In schools, children are taught to memorise the periodic table and the life cycle of a frog, but not the leaf that can soothe a fever or the root that heals a cut. They learn the formula of glucose, not the plant that helps regulate it.
The Vanishing Knowledge
In the villages of old, the backyard was not just a place to dry clothes—it was a living herbal garden. Tulsi grew near the doorstep, neem behind the cowshed, turmeric dried under the sun, and aloe vera waited quietly in a corner. Even roadside weeds had meaning.
Guduchi (giloy) for dengue and immunity, gaish for skin ailments, bhuin anla for respiratory issues, apang for dysentery, dantun (neem twig) for teeth, bhringaraj for hair, arjun bark for the heart, patharchatta (Kalanchoe pinnata) for kidney stones—every shrub was a teacher.
Children learned not from textbooks but by imitation. They watched their mothers mixing neem leaves with turmeric paste for wounds, grandmothers boiling tulsi with black pepper for coughs, and elders advising what to eat or avoid in a particular season.
That was indigenous health education—oral, practical, continuous.
Now, what do our schools teach? Chapters on chlorophyll and photosynthesis, but no mention that chlorophyll helps cleanse blood. Medicinal plants appear only in a passing paragraph under “Biodiversity Conservation.” There’s no connection between what grows under one’s nose and what keeps one healthy.
The home—once a pharmacy and dispensary combined—has lost its place in the curriculum.
From Mothers to Machines
Knowledge that once flowed through mothers, grandmothers, and midwives has dried up in the nuclear family tap. The joint family, for all its quarrels and nosy elders, had one priceless function—it transmitted wisdom.
The young bride learned recipes not just for food but for wellness: when to drink jeera water, how to balance the body in monsoon, which leaf cools the stomach, and what paste relieves pain.
Today, that home-knowledge has shifted to the market.
The modern kitchen is now a showroom of stainless steel and instant mixes. The mother knows how to Google symptoms, but not how to recognise the bitter leaf of chiraita that prevents them. When illness comes, she rushes to the clinic, pays for a scan, and buys tablets made from synthetic compounds—what the forest once freely gave.
Grandmothers, who once stored herbs in earthen pots, now store only memories of them. Their hands no longer crush leaves on a stone grinder; instead, they scroll on phone screens.
The Irony of Glorification
Ironically, the same society that dismisses indigenous wisdom glorifies it in festivals, documentaries, and tourism. A new elite vocabulary has emerged: organic, eco-friendly, Ayurvedic.
Urban consumers buy “herbal” soaps at triple the price while ignoring the neem tree outside their flat. Yoga mats made of imported cork cost more than the entire health system of a village.
Thus, the proverb “Prevention is better than cure” becomes a satire. We praise prevention but invest in cure. We celebrate turmeric latte in cafés but forget haldi doodh at home. We promote “Herbal India” in advertisements, but our children cannot identify ten common medicinal plants growing in the courtyard.
Science and Its Discontents
It is not that laboratory science is wrong; it has simply forgotten its roots. Indigenous knowledge is often dismissed as “unscientific,” yet many modern drugs have originated from folk wisdom—quinine from bark, aspirin from willow, antibiotics from soil fungi.
The village grandmother’s bitter decoction may not pass double-blind trials, but it passed something more enduring—generations of survival.
Yes, traditional knowledge has its limits. It often lacks dosage precision and can be misused. But the tragedy is not that it was imperfect—all knowledge systems are. The tragedy is that it was abandoned rather than refined.
Instead of integrating the lab and the leaf, we built walls between them.
The Lost Seasons of Health
Traditional India knew that the body and the seasons were twins. Summer required cooling fruits—watermelon, cucumber, bael sherbet—to prevent dehydration. Winter demanded heating spices like ginger, pepper, and mustard oil to keep circulation alive.
When the skin turned rough in winter due to lack of Vitamin C, nature provided citrus fruits and vegetables rich in it. The monsoon had its own rules of hygiene and fasting. Nature designed preventive medicine through seasonal rhythm.
Now, supermarkets have made every fruit seasonless: tomatoes in summer, oranges in monsoon, strawberries in March. The body has lost its dialogue with the soil.
The result? Lifestyle diseases—diabetes, hypertension, obesity—all preventable, all cured too late.
Nature grows fruits and vegetables that boost our immunity, but we choose pizza and burgers that fill us without nourishing us—a truth rediscovered during COVID-19.
The Wild Classroom
If we truly believed in prevention, every school would have a green classroom—a small herbal garden where students plant and study native herbs, record their uses, observe seasonal cycles, and learn that the earth itself teaches biology.
Let children crush tulsi and smell it, taste giloy juice and note its bitterness, draw diagrams of neem not just as a leaf but as a pharmacy.
That would be real science—living, local, and sustainable. It would also restore dignity to traditional healers who were once the barefoot doctors of India.
But in a world obsessed with grades and gadgets, prevention remains a slogan, not a vision. After all, who needs prevention when pills promise salvation?
Today, the hospital is the new temple, and the doctor the new priest. We no longer go for blessings, but for prescriptions. Our faith has shifted—from plants to pills, from balance to chemical correction. The modern mind worships the cure: fast, branded, convenient.
Cure Has a Market; Prevention Has a Memory
The problem is as much economic as cultural. Prevention doesn’t sell—cure does. There’s no profit in advising people to walk, breathe, and eat seasonal fruits. But there’s a fortune in treating what the wrong lifestyle causes.
Advertising tells us to “Live life king-size”—eat junk, skip sleep, chase success—and then depend on health insurance, hospitals, and multivitamins. Pharmacies grow bigger while wild herbs wither unseen. The neem leaf gets replaced by imported green tea.
The satire is complete: the same person who refused bitter neem in childhood now pays for detox drinks made of kale and spinach. The plant didn’t change—our attention did.
The Disappearing Healer
Traditional practitioners—Vaidya, Hakim, Ojha, Dai—once stood at the centre of community health. They knew the land, the patient, the season, the temperament, and the plant. But their knowledge remained oral and unrecorded.
The state did not institutionalise it, the market did not respect it, and the new generation did not inherit it.
The question posed at the beginning—“Is it true?”—compels us to pause and reflect. We have indeed drifted away from our roots and become captives of the market.
In all traditional medical systems—Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, and countless indigenous practices—food was regarded as the first medicine (āhāra hi auṣadha). Health was never seen as an outcome of treatment alone but as a daily discipline rooted in diet, environment, and moral balance.
Seasonal eating, local crops, and plant-based recipes sustained not only physical health but also ecological and cultural harmony. The modern consumerist order, driven by market logic, has replaced this diversity with uniformity, convenience, and profit.
The result: lifestyle diseases, the loss of native crop varieties, and the erosion of self-reliant village economies.
In truth, we have moved from the soil to the market, and now wander directionless in the glittering web of consumer illusion—a māyā that entangles even formal knowledge.
The market has become our new faith, while we have grown distant from the reality of our indigenous systems—once our source of pride, wisdom, and identity.
The crisis is not of knowledge alone, but of disconnection—between human and nature, body and spirit, tradition and science.
This is not a time for one system to prevail over another, but a time to walk together. The ancient and the modern, the intuitive and the analytical, the indigenous and the institutional—all must converge into one integrated system of well-being.
Only such a synthesis can heal both human health and ecological health—and restore the balance between knowledge and life that our civilisation once knew so well.
