NIScPR has set up a Herbarium and Museum housing economically important raw materials of plant, animal and mineral origin from India at one place, to cater to the needs of scientists, researchers, industrialists students and the public at large. The Herbarium houses over 8000 specimen of economic and medicinal plants of India and the Museum comprises over 3000 samples of crude-drugs, animal and mineral specimens.
The NIScPR Herbarium & Museum has been assigned the acronym RHMD (Raw Materials Herbarium & Museum, Delhi) by the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, which appeared in the publiication "Index Herbarium, New York, USA" (1990).
The herbarium provides information on folk-lore, ethnomedicine and traditional medicine and is a source of knowledge for development of new herbal medicines.
This facility backed up by the Wealth of India publications, is a veritable storehouse of information on the raw materials of India, is useful to students to gain knowledge on economic biology and geology. Based on this facility and the available expertise, the following services are offered.
The RHMD, store house of collection of genuine samples of Indian Raw Materials — Plants, Animals and Minerals of economic importance is an important section that attracts the attention of all those who visit CSIR-NIScPR, be it national/international guests/delegates of repute or young school students. With such a genuine collection and experienced taxonomist Dr Sunita Garg, CSIR-Emeritus Scientist as resource person, RHMD provides authentication service (Identification of botanical specimens based on morphological observation and extensive literature study) to students, researchers, and entrepreneurs who deal with natural products/herbs. It is a paid service at a nominal cost of Rs. 500/- + 18% GST (Rs. 590/-) per sample. During the period 2018-19, (April 2018-March 2019), we received about 22 general visitors and about 1536 school students accompanied by about 142 teachers from various schools in and around Delhi on different dates, mostly under JIGYASA, the Students-Scientist Connect initiative taken by CSIR to encourage students to science stream as career. Visitors were excited and appreciative of witnessing such unique collections. Visitors, especially students, were explained about making of as well as importance of Herbarium sheets in plant collection. As part of our authentication service of plants, plant parts and crude drug samples, we did 335 samples for 127 clients and collected a revenue of Rs. 1,97,650/- (One lakh ninety-seven thousand fifty only). Our clients this season includes: Divya Pharmacy (Patanjali), Green Chem, Jamia Hamdard, Emami, Ananta Medicare, Natural Remedies Pvt. Ltd., Rajvaidya sheetal Prasad & Sons, Gencor Pacific Organics India Pvt. Ltd., etc.
NIScPR has published a Handbook on Herbaria in India and Neighboring Countries, as a source of reference on repositories of plant wealth of the sub-continent. This publication is a useful guide for information on the availability of specimens, especially Angiosperms and also special group of plants like Algae, Fungi, Lichens etc. along with authentic and rare illustrations.
Recently NIScPR has published a book entitled “Field Manual on Herbarium Techniques”. The book highlights the current approaches for the use of state-of-art technology for collection of plant specimens from various groups of plants, their preservation, identification, nomenclature, methods of documentation of information of plants and management of herbaria and other relevant areas associated with herbarium techniques and research. The book is useful to the persons working as herbarium curators, teachers, scientists, foresters, research scholars, students and those who are interested in setting up herbaria.
A short-term training cum workshop on Herbarium techniques is being offered by NIScPR to the participants from India as well as SAARC countries annually. The aim of the workshop is to impart current knowledge on scientific methods of plant collection, preservation, identification, nomenclature, techniques for creation of herbarium database, documentation of information on plants, management of herbaria etc. to the participants and to make them aware of the latest developments related to the herbarium techniques. The workshop is targeted to benefit herbarium curators, bioscience teachers of schools, college/university lecturers, scientists from research institutions, research scholars and students and those who are interested in setting up a regional herbaria to house useful plants or other plants of their locality for educative or research purposes.
Contact Person : Mr. R.S. Jayasomu; Dr. Subha Rastogi email: somu@niscpr.res.in; srastogi@niscpr.res.in
