When illness strikes her family, Vanita Thakre, like most people, sends out for medicine. Only her pharmacy is the forest. “Some plants, like ambe, neeli and peeli halad (white, blue and yellow turmeric), are a permanent fixture in my home,” says Vanita, listing their benefits: blue turmeric treats asthma, white eases joint pains and yellow is an antiseptic.Drawing on an oral pharmacopeia committed to memory since childhood, she transforms roots, stems and leaves into salves, poultices and tonics at Aarey Forest.World Wildlife Day (March 3) turns the spotlight on the botanical bedrock of Vanita’s healthcare system: medicinal and aromatic plants. In India, medicinal plants account for approximately 15,000 of the country’s 45,000 plant species, according to the ICAR-Directorate of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants Research. Additionally, they form the plinth of India’s traditional healing systems—Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, Naturopathy and Homeopathy. A 2023 survey by the Ministry of AYUSH found that 46% of rural respondents and 53% of urban respondents reported using at least one of these systems for the prevention and treatment of ailments.Yet, few people, like Thakre, go straight to the source. The plants themselves are harder to find. “Mumbai and the surrounding region grew several medicinal species, such as Chlorophytum borivilianum (Safed musli), a tonic, Tinospora cordifolia (Giloy), an immunity booster, and Helicteres isora (Murud Sheng, or the screw fruit), which treated colic,” says naturalist and author Vijaya Chakravarty. “You hardly see these plants today.“Which is precisely what makes Thakre’s work important. Thakre—a Warli resident of Khambachapada, an adivasi hamlet in Aarey Forest—and Sanjiv Valsan—founder of Waghoba Habitat Foundation—work to conserve traditional ecological knowledge by curating wild food foraging walks, cookouts and planting exercises.Categorising plants as medicinal and aromatic is tricky, admits Vinita Gowda. “The definition of what constitutes a medicinal or aromatic plant needs clarification,” says the associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal.Every plant, she points out, can be medicinal when consumed in the right dosage. Beyond that threshold, it turns toxic. The semantics do not bother Thakre or Valsan. Their objective is to cultivate an affinity for all plants in the forest. When city folks understand the ecology of Aarey, they lend their voice to conservation protests, pay for events and buy forest produce. By creating a market for the plants, the nonprofit generated income for adivasi people and reopened routes to the forest that started to close because of a growing dependence on store-bought foods. “Foraging for both medicine and food declined. When people do not use plants, they lose that ecological knowledge and the will to protect it. Eventually, they stand to lose the forest.”By 2018, Mumbai lost 77% of its green cover, according to a 2021 study published in a Springer journal. As green cover depletes, people fail to notice what is left—a phenomenon called tree or plant blindness that can expose ‘unseen’ specimens to all manner of threats. Abhishek Khan— a research-based artist on weekdays and a “storyteller for botany” on weekends—works to cure it. His Theatre of Botany series of themed tree walks—with intriguing titles such as ‘Botany of Alcohol’ and ‘Botany of Nightmares and Dreams’—is part of his project Mumbai Vann that casts trees and plants as dramatis personae of the city. “Trees have to grow in two fertile, places to survive, ” says Khan, “the soil, and a person’s imagination.”
