The Union government has sanctioned over ₹864 lakh to various institutes, universities and academies for research on the medicinal practices and healing traditions of tribal communities across the country, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs on Monday told the Lok Sabha.
The government data revealed that a lion’s share of this funding — over ₹312 lakh — has been allotted to the Patanjali Research Institute in Haridwar, which has received this amount for projects unrelated to tribal medicine as well.
The second largest chunk of this funding has gone to the Pravara Institute of Medical Science, Loni, Uttar Pradesh, which is supposed to be using the ₹195 lakh allocation for a “Survey for Identification, Enlisting of Traditional Tribal Healers, Study, Documentation and testing of Tribal Health Traditions, Tribal Medicine (Healing Practices and Ethno-Medicine) of different Tribal Communities in State of Maharashtra”.
Of the projects for which the Patanjali Research Institute (PRI) has been sanctioned funds, some include collection of ethno-medicinal information from traditional healers, documentation of medicinal information of plants with a research review approach, collection, and herbarium preparation and identification of plants from different tribal regions.
In addition to this, the government said the PRI was assigned funds to work on preparing a herbal monograph of selected medicinal plants, profiling of these plants, and “guidance, coordination and training of tribal traditional healers”.
Some of the projects that the PRI is using the funds for do not seem to have any connection to the study of tribal medicines or healing practices of tribal communities. These include, “Demographic and Socio-economic Information of Tribal Community through Digital Support with Geo-tagging; Survey of Government Schemes and their actual beneficiaries’ details; Documentation of different works of Tribal Artisans; Livelihood support system to the tribal communities through beekeeping, agriculture and traditional arts; E-commerce platform and Web-portal for Livelihood Support.”
National institutes
Apart from this, the funding for research in this sector has gone to institutes such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Jodhpur; the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER), Guwahati, the Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Science (CCRAS) and the Central Council for Research In Homoeopathy (CCRH) in New Delhi, and Tribal Research Institutes (TRI) in several States and Union Territories.
While the CCRH is working on a pilot project to integrate homoeopathy and yoga in the National Programme for Prevention of Cancer, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Diseases, and Stroke (NPCDCS) in two tribal districts (Sambalpur, Odisha and Nasik, Maharashtra), AIIMS in Jodhpur is working on studying the epistemology of traditional knowledge and healing practices of indigenous people in Sirohi, Rajasthan.
Further, several TRIs are working on projects to document traditional healing practices of tribal communities in Jharkhand, Odisha, Assam, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and several other States.
For instance, Kerala is working on a project to document the knowledge of 300 tribal healers; whereas AIIMS, Bhopal is working on studying the “ethno-botanical role of medicinal plants” used by local tribespeople in the State.
Some of these projects have been approved by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs under the Tribal Festival Research Information Education, Communication and Events (TRI-ECE) scheme. Others have been approved under the ‘Support to TRIs scheme’ and the Ministry of Ayush, the government said.
