As forests shrink, these Mumbaikars fight plant blindness

When illness strikes her family, Vanita Thakre, like most people, sends out for medicine. Only her pharmacy is the forest, and her prescription drugs are plants. “Some plants, like ambe, neeli and peeli halad (white, blue and yellow turmeric), are a permanent fixture in my home,” says Vanita, listing their colour-coded benefits: blue turmeric treats asthma, white eases joint pains, and yellow is an antiseptic—and a cornerstone of the kitchen.

Drawing on an oral pharmacopeia committed to memory since childhood, she transforms roots, stems and leaves into salves, poultices and tonics, her hand trained in the laboratory of her landscape—Aarey Forest.

This World Wildlife Day (March 3), turns the spotlight on the botanical bedrock of Vanita’s healthcare system: Medicinal and Aromatic Plants.

According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 species worldwide are “harvested for their healing properties, cultural significance and economic value.”

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, including yoga, for the prevention and treatment of ailments.

Yet, few people, like Thakre, go straight to the source. The plants themselves have become harder to find. “Mumbai and the surrounding region grew several medicinal species, such as Chlorophytum borivilianum (Safed musli), an immune booster, Clitoria ternatea (Blue Pea), a relaxant, 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 wor important.

Thakre—a Warli resident of Khambachapada, an Adivasi hamlet in Aarey Forest—and Sanjiv Valsan—founder of Waghoba Habitat Foundation—work to conserve both the forest and traditional ecological knowledge by curating wild food foraging walks, cookouts and planting exercises that keep this knowledge rooted in lived practice.

Many medicinal plants double as food. Volume 25 of the Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, in its section on medicinal plants, attributes to Abelmoschus esculentus the properties of enriching blood, curing biliousness, and increasing libido—a plant we know simply as bhindi.

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. Ideally, compendia of local medicinal plants should only identify those with commercial value, species that can be cultivated at scale for industry, without denying smaller or less traded plants their medicinal status.

The same ambiguity shadows aromatics or fragrant plants. “Most plants are aromatic,” she says. “It’s really a question of what you choose to call aromatic.”

The semantics don’t 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 ticketed events and buy forest produce. “We sold 100 kg of wild tubers to an organic food company last week,” says Valsan, adding that they’re careful not to overharvest, and prioritise the Adivasis’ own needs.

By creating a market for the plants, the nonprofit has generated income for Adivasi people and reopened routes to the forest that had started to close because of a growing dependence on store-bought foods. “Foraging for bothmedicine and food have declined. When people don’t use plants, they lose that ecological knowledge and the will to protect it. Eventually, they stand to lose the forest itself."

By 2018, Mumbai had lost 77 percent of its green cover, according to a 2021 study published in a Springer journal. “The city still has 3,000 acres of forest that have not been notified, leaving them open to plunder,” says Stalin Dayanand, director of Vanashakti. Their 2025 book, The Missing Forests of Mumbai, maps these vulnerable tracts and documents the cultural and ecological significance of the 111 species found there. “When you’re clearing forests, you’re least concerned about which plants are medicinal or aromatic. Everything goes.”

As green cover depletes, people fail to notice what's left—a phenomenon called tree or plant blindness that can expose 'unseen’ specimens to all manner of threats. Abhishek Khan 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: the soil and a person's imagination,” he says.

Khan, a research-based artist and designer on weekdays, becomes what he calls a “storyteller for botany” on weekends. He speaks of the ill-fated Cinnamomum verum (Ceylon cinnamon) at Rani Baug, whose fragrant bark and branches were habitually stripped by visitors, leaving the tree wounded and vulnerable to pathogens, “making it one of the most heavily vandalised trees in the city”. His walks aim to teach people to read trees not only to know them better, but to recognise such signs of distress.

Driven by a sense of climate urgency, he says it is adults, not children he's trying to convert. “We can’t afford to spend years making a case for nature to children, hoping they’ll grow up to make a difference.”
Get the latest lifestyle updates on Times of India, along with Holi wishes, messages and quotes !