 In South India, Thirumaya and his companions pay homage to a sacred tree. They are traditional healers who draw their inspiration and their livelihood from the surrounding forest. Thangamani is the first person the Siddharbeta villagers think of when they feel unwell. They know and trust her and are sure she will find the right herbs to make them better, whether it is a headache, a fever or a more serious complaint. Thirumaya is a folk healer, a vishivedh, who specializes in treating snake bites and other poisonous insect stings. A biodiversity hotspot, India is a rich and diverse resource base for pharmaceutical flora. 50% of the world's known plant species are found in the tropical rainforests here. Many are unique to the region. Pick up any drug at your local chemist and the chances are you will find its origins in an old folk remedy. In fact, one in every four of the medicines we take contains active ingredients derived from plants. Aloe vera for fevers and headaches. Amaltas for diabetes and arthritis. Buamla for jaundice. Karela for liver and skin diseases and so on. In the first century AD, the venerated physician Charaka recorded the applications of 350 pharmaceutical species in India's first written medical treatise, the Charaka Samhita. This became the foundation of a vast repository of knowledge systems that depended on the curative properties of plants and other natural substances. Most of these systems are still in practice today. This has made the development, conservation and preservation of the country's flora a top national priority. Government departments, non-governmental organisations and some private corporations are now focusing on the preservation of these varieties. This placement of traditional healing practices into a modern context has proved enormously successful for the Kani Tribals in South India. Scientists from the Tropical Botanical Garden Research Institute launched an investigation into the tribal habit of chewing a plant, commonly known as arogyapacha, that grew abundantly in the vicinity. The result was a scientific breakthrough. Researchers isolated an active ingredient that enhanced human energy. It provided the basis of the formula for the tonic givany that is today being produced and marketed by a well-known pharmaceutical company. This is the first ever commercial partnership between a manufacturing concern and an indigenous people, where proceeds from licensing and royalties from givany have been reimbursed to the community that kept the secret alive for centuries. Even among the affluent societies, a growing awareness of the adverse effects of synthetic chemicals is causing more and more people to switch to natural products. In the private sector also, many Indian and multinational drug companies, besides producing herbal drugs, are investing crores in research to validate the efficacy of many more traditional medicines. At first sight, the urban herbal health care syndrome may seem far removed from the village courtyard and the tribal medicine man, but it is only by combining these forces, the traditional and the everyday, with the modern and the innovative, that India's unique natural and intellectual heritage will endure.