SpecificObjectives:

- Develop an interactive and collaborative technology platform that enables the collection,curation and dissemination  ofinformation related to medicinal plants from various sources. The portal willbe available on mobile devices and in local languages thus making it easy toengage citizens and local traditional health practitioners.

- Incrementally, aggregateand curate data on human, animal and plant health, from various sources -classical texts (Ayurveda, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa, Unani), scientific papers,public domain science and medical databases as well as documented local healthtraditions, with the support of a network of dedicated community-basedorganisations.

Stakeholders/users:

- Members of local communities seeking cures forailments, information on local resources including the location of traditionalhealers and distribution of medicinal plants.

-Traditional health healers/practitioners - TDU andits partner organizations work with a very active network of healers. Thesepractitioners would greatly benefit from a platform where they can publishtheir knowledge with their Intellectual Property protected through prior artrules as well as access information from others.

- Knowledge holders - organizations like TDU, TKDL,CIKS. Organizations which have expertise in a particular area can takeownership of their data and ensure it is complete, curated and validated.  

- Community based organizations. TDU already workswith many CBOs.

- Health Departments of State Governments

- Veterinary Departments of State Governments

- Academia: Researchers, including from TDU willbenefit from having a single source of truth, making querying, maintaining andupdating it much easier. Students will benefit from having an authoritativereference.

- General public

Currentstatus:

The backend architecture and database for storingmedicinal plants data with their taxonomic, botanical, classical Ayurvedainformation along with formulations, treatments and references has beencreated. The data architecture for this was finalized after consultations withmany experts during the pilot phase of the National Mission on Biodiversity andHuman-Wellbeing.

An interactive user interface to search, query, accessthe data as well as a suggestions and information sharing interface have beencreated.

Efforts are on to curate and ingest the first set ofdata based on the BOTMAST list which has been cross referenced with the KEWdatabase as well as data from the IMPLAD and CIPA databases. Expected timelineof completion of this effort is December 2024.

A beta launch of the portal with the corefunctionality exposed is planned for January 2025.

Next steps:

The next phase of development in the CPMP consists of:

-       Development of the Local Health Traditions module

-       Development of site/utility specific applications

-       Integrating data from other databases in the TDUecosystem, like ENVIS, medicinal plants.in and homeremedy.in

-       Development of contribution and curation module, whichwill allow experts to directly curate and update data on the portal.

Local Health Traditions Module in CPMP:

This involves building the module wheredata collected from or contributed by local health practitioners or healers canbe databased in a common framework, enabling scaling of projects that documentinformation on local health traditions, similar to the HD Kote projectundertaken by TDU.  

This module would be built as part of theCPMP, so that it is closely integrated with the botanical, ayurvedic andclassical information on medicinal plants, ensuring that data is not replicatedand/or stored in silos and everybody has access to validated and updatedinformation.

The data architecture of the CPMP ensuresthat all data can be geographically referenced, at various levels ofgranularity. The data collected as part of the RIST project would be databasedin this module and made available through site specific and interactiveinterfaces.

The module design ensures multilingualoperation such that data from different sources can be stored in differentIndian languages in the same database. This will enable cross referencingacross different sites, even when data collection efforts are localized. Essentially,data from different sites can be searched on a single interface if required.

The Local Health Traditions module shallbe designed to ensure the accurate attribution of information on treatmentapproaches, protocols and related information to their identified sources suchthat healers, communities and individuals can be recognized, compensated forand take ownership of their local health traditions, while ensuring that theirintellectual property rights are documented and recognised.