Preservation Of Indigenous Medicinal Knowledge Of Tribal People Through Ict

Research Article
Lakshmi Padmavathi P., Suvarna Latha A., Shanhi Sree K.S., Bharathi D and Nagalakshmamma K
DOI: 
http://dx.doi.org/10.24327/ijrsr.2018.0904.1877
Subject: 
science
KeyWords: 
Emporium, indigenous, therapeutics, collaborative, and bio-piracy.
Abstract: 

India is a veritable emporium of herbs. The inhabitants of India knew the medicinal value of plants from time immemorial. Tribal people’s knowledge on medicinal flora of their surroundings is ingenuous. The knowledge and awareness of these medicinal plants is extremely useful to the tribal populations which depend more on such remedies than a physician’s recipe which is not easily available for them. Tribal medicine is more effective in health promotion and disease prevention. It is a natural process in curing the diseases of indigenous people across the world. Tribal people are eco-friendly and used to find cures to all their ailments from the nature. It is a known fact that plant alkaloids play very important role in the therapeutic activity and they have been in use in indigenous culture since a long time. New molecules extracted from plant alkaloids are introduced for treatment of various diseases like infections, hyper tension, diabetes, cancer etc. under Modern medicine. Modern world recognised the high value and importance of Indigenous knowledge and the need to preserve it through information technologies (IT). Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can play significant role in capturing the knowledge, its management and dissemination. Also an urgent need is there to identify utmost unresolved issues which demands further collaborative research and development and closer cooperation between Indigenous communities, researchers and software developers. Such coordinated effort can provide needed relief to humanity from the chronic ailments and at the same time it offers required comforts to the tribal communities to sustain the practices with the rights over knowledge shared and mitigate bio-piracy of knowledge which they helped to record. Providing rights of knowledge to the indigenous persons be given utmost importance, to facilitate the process of collecting and recording the knowledge without hindrance.