ABSTRACT
Today, the world population is nearing 5 billion at a rate of growth which is likely to touch 7.5 billion by the year 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 80% of the population of the developing countries rely on traditional medicines, mostly plant-based drugs, for their primary health care needs. Also, modern pharmacopoeia still contains at least 25% drugs derived from plants while many others are synthetic analogues built on prototype compounds isolated from plants. The demand for medicinal plants is steadily increasing in both developing and developed countries due to the growing recognition of drugs based on natural products, food supplements and flavours. Being non-narcotic, having no side-effects and easy availability at affordable prices makes these products sometimes the only source of health care available to the poor. The use of plants in the form of medicine goes back to the stone age. Certainly, the great civilizations of the ancient Chinese, Indians and north Africans have provided written evidence of man's ingenuity in utilizing plants for the treatment of a wide variety of diseases (Phillipson, 2001). Medicinal plants have traditionally occupied an important position in the socio-cultural, spiritual and medicinal arena of rural and tribal lives in India. In this subcontinent, the current herbal drug production is around US$ 1000 million (Anonymous, 2001).
