The Politics of Knowledge of Medicinal Plants in India: Corporations, Collectors and Cultivators as Constituents

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This article seeks to understand one of the most important problems in the contemporary discourse of modern development, that of management, control, collection and trade of medicinal plants in India. The tremendous growth in the market for herbal medicines since the 1990s has prompted large-scale industrial production of these medicines by big pharmaceutical corporations. This relies on medicinal plants mostly derived from the wild, and while their market has grown enormously, it has also led to their over-harvesting, without any concomitant efforts at regeneration. This article offers to analyse the political aspect of the existing market supply chain of medicinal plants in India. This study specifically focuses on problematizing the complex power structures in the market supply chain of medicinal plants, with reference to the knowledge of production that guides the corporations. In order to manufacture herbal products on the basis of large-scale centralized production systems, the corporations privilege their ‘knowledge’ of harvesting, production and distribution over that of the collectors. The collectors are usually part of communities that have built up their knowledge of accessibility and medicinal properties of these medicinal plants over centuries of care, experience and innovation. It is when these two knowledge systems clash, in the larger context of political economy of development and the public policies of the state, that the degradation of nature becomes inevitable.