Medicinal plant ‘sarpagandha’ listed as endangered

Sarpagandha roots are used to treat hypertension, fever, wounds, sleeplessness, epilepsy and giddiness.

CHENNAI: In an effort to identify and prioritise medicinal plants which are facing threat of extinction in wild, University of Transdisciplinary Health Sciences and Technology (TDU) is conducting Conservation Assessment and Management Prioritisation (CAMP) workshops through a rapid threat assessment exercise for their conservation in collaboration with many government and non-government organisations, research and educational institutions, state forest departments and various medicinal plant stakeholders in different states across the country.

The IUCN Red List Categories are intended to be easily and widely understood system for classifying species at high risk of regional to global extinction and to provide an explicit and objective framework for the classification of species according to their extinction risk. One such red listed medicinal plant assessed as endangered for Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu is sarpagandha, botanically known as Rauvolfia serpentina (L.) Benth. ex Kurz belonging to the family Apocynaceae. In India, it is distributed from Himachal to Arunachal Pradesh. Its presence is also recorded in the hills of Western and Eastern Ghats as well as Eastern and Central India. 

It is a native, perennial, evergreen undershrub which reaches up to a height of one metre with a woody stem and milky latex leaves which are three per node ranging from 10 to 15 cm in length and three to five centimetres in breadth, the lateral veins are 8-12 pairs with petioles across a length of five millimeters. Inflorescence are corymbose cymes and  axillary with  five to seven flowers in Calyx red and Corolla white. Fruits are fleshy drupes of seven millimeters across, with globose and purplish-black is shiny and has two lobes and Seeds. Sarpagandha roots are used to treat hypertension, fever, wounds, sleeplessness, epilepsy and giddiness.

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