Biolaya

Herb collection provides an important source of income to people living in remote villages, especially those who own little land for growing cash crops.

There are hundreds of herb species growing in Himachal Pradesh which are known to have medicinal properties. Only half a dozen of these species are commonly traded though, and as a result they have been widely over-harvested and are rapidly disappearing from their natural habitats.

The aim of our wild collection project is to help reduce dependency on collection of threatened species by providing an alternative source of income through sustainable collection of more common herbs. Most of the endangered herbs in Himachal Pradesh are harvested for their underground parts; the roots are dug out and the plant is left with little chance of regeneration. Our mission is to identify and promote collection of species that can be sustainably harvested, for example by collecting their aerial parts or their berries, which can easily regenerate year after year.

Many of the more common species that have potential for sustainable collection have little medicinal or market value in their raw form. In many cases the local people may never have collected or used these species, or even be aware that they have any use at all. If these herbs can be processed into a more valuable form, and where possible backed up with scientific research, they can be transformed from 'weeds' into high quality herbal medicines, essential oils or natural dyes, and an important source of income for the local people.

The concept of our enterprise is to develop products based on naturally available resources that can be sustainably managed by the local community. We aim to create a model that demonstrates how, instead of leading to destruction of the environment, business can provide economic incentives for the local community to preserve their natural wealth. Rather than eat further into Nature's capital we aim to encourage people to live off its interest.

Please bear with us while we complete the remaining pages...

Collector Groups Read about how we select and train our collector group, and our vision for building their micro-enterprise... >> Coming soon		Sustainable Collection Read about the systems we have developed to ensure the collectors are harvesting the herbs sustainably... >> Coming Soon

Value Addition Most of the herbs we are collecting from the wild require some form of value addition for the enterprise to be commercially viable... >> Coming soon		Government Policy Having encountered policies both supportive and prohibitive we summarise our experience and recommendations... >> Coming Soon

Oregano grows naturally in the high meadows of Himachal Pradesh...

In some areas it grows in abundance; yet surprisingly it is never used by the local people who often refer to it as 'useless grass'

Unlike most of the valuable Himalayan herbs, which are harvested for their roots, oregano's medicinal and aromatic properties are in its aerial parts and it has a high capacity for regeneration, which means that it is a good species for sustainable collection

Although more famous as a culinary herb used on pizzas, oregano also contains a valuable essential oil with powerful antibacterial properties.

With potential for sustainable collection as well as a promising market value, oregano seemed to be a perfect species to work with to provide an alternative source of income to herb collectors who would otherwise be collecting endangered species

Having decided to start working with Himalayan oregano the first thing we did was to distil some samples and send them to SGS in Delhi to test the quality of the essential oil...

Preliminary results were excellent - the oil was found to contain a high carvacrol content and was more effective at killing MRSA than all of the 18 other antimicrobial agents (nb. we later found that the carvacrol and thymol content varies considerably from year to year and place to place, and that the antimicrobial efficacy remained more or less the same regardless of the carvacrol content... see 'research' page for more details on the results of our research)

With the knowledge that Himalayan oregano oil has potent antimicrobial properties we started working on plans to develop antibacterial products that would help combat drug-resistant bacteria at the same time as providing income to Himalayan herb collectors

The next requirement was to scale up production, starting with a large resource assessment study to document the population of oregano growing in the Kullu District. We sent teams of people to search every meadow at 3000 metres and built up a database of suitable collection sites.

Wherever we find large populations of oregano we identify which of the local villages have collection rights in that area. The village in the photograph here is a typical oregano collection village - the village itself is a couple of hours walk from the nearest road. The oregano grows in the meadows above the village towards the top of the tree-line.

The next step is to find out which people in the village are involved in herb collection and interested in joining our oregano collection programme. They are often surprised to hear that we want them to collect oregano, which they never perceived to have any value

We choose the collectors using selection criteria based on their economic status, their dependency on forest resources and collection of endangered herbs for their livelihoods.

The registered collectors are provided with a plant monograph with guidelines on plant identification, sustainable collection and transportation methods, and given training by Biolaya field officers

The method we use for sustainable collection depends on whether the seeds are mature or not; if the seeds are not mature then only 70% of the available plants in an area should be collected...

Once the seeds are mature (by October) then 100% of the plants can be collected and the seeds should be scattered in the surrounding area before being put in the sack

We conduct regeneration studies to research the sustainability of different collection methods. This photo shows Raju and Surie counting plants in a one metre quadrant, which is harvested and counted again the following year to see the regeneration rate

A collector group in the Lag Valley

Oregano collection

Oregano collection... overlooking the Kullu Valley. Biolaya's office is just out of sight behind Surie

Oregano collection

The oregano is then carried down in sacks. Many of the collection areas are more than 3 hours walk from the nearest road

The oregano is transported to our processing unit and laid out on racks in preparation for distillation

Ram Singh filling up the 20kg unit with oregano...

Ashok with the 50kg unit...

...fuelled by biomass briquettes made out of rice husks (an environmentally friendly alternative to wood)

Ashok collecting the essential oil after distillation

The slideshow is not complete... more to come soon!

Oregano Slideshow
A photo slideshow of Biolaya's Himalayan Oregano Oil project... Click on image

International Standard for Sustainable Collection of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (ISSC-MAP) - IUCN Download

Guidance Manual for Organic Collection of Wild Plants - IMO & SIPPO. Download

FairWild - The FairWild Foundation promotes the sustainable use of wild-collected ingredients, with a fair deal for all those involved throughout the supply chain. Open

ISSC-MAP - The 'documentation and download' site of ISSC-MAP. Open

National Medicinal Plants Board - The government body in India that oversees all medicinal plant activity. Open