Medicinal Plants Are Vanishing From the Mountains of Kashmir

TANGMARG, Indian Administered Kashmir — On a chilly March morning, Gulzar Ahmed, 34, walked through the hilly meadows around his house in Tangmarg, in the forest foothills of the Pir Panjal Range. Ahmed was born and raised in this quiet little town.

Each year as a child, when the snow would liquefy and the slopes would slowly turn green, he collected the leaves and seeds of various plants his mother used to create medicines for treating colds, cough, and fever during the winter months.

But the plants that were once abundant on Tangmarg’s slopes just four years ago are now difficult to find, and the reasons why are complicated.

“There is a 50 percent decrease in the growth of these plants in the past few years,” said a local resident named Abdul Razak, pointing toward the slopes of Gulmarg — a tourist area known for its snowclad mountains. His estimation of the decline is based on his own observations.

Kashmir is known not only for its alpine meadows and pastures, but also for its wild medicinal herbs, like trillium (known as tripater in Kashmiri), artemisia (tethwan), arnebia benthamii (kahzaban), and picrorhiza kurrooa (known as kutki in Nepali), all of which are important to the manufacturing of ayurvedic and unani medicines. Several of these, including artemisia and trillium, are on the verge of extinction.

Found in places like Gulmarg, Sonamarg, Gananpeer, and several parts of the remote areas of Budgam and Kupwara in Kashmir, these plants are traditionally used to alleviate nearly 300 types of diseases — everything from stomach ailments to heart problems. Researchers have identified 20 important medicinal species in the region, each used to cure more than 25 diseases.

Akhter H. Malik, a botanist at the University of Kashmir, has also watched the number of these plants fall over time.

“Earlier, when we’d go to collect samples for research, we would find them easily, but now we have to trek to the upper reaches,” he said.

The Himalayan region is among what researchers say are 36 biodiversity hot spots in the world — places with unique, endemic species that are found nowhere else on Earth. And, slowly but surely, many of the critical plant species in the Kashmir biodiversity hot spot are dying out.

If the picking of medicinal plants does not become regulated, Malik said, “all of the biodiversity will be destroyed.”

Climate change plays its insidious role

Apart from rearing animals, one of the major sources of income for Himalayan forest dwellers is agriculture. Climate change, however, with its uneven and harsh weather patterns, has forced them to shift their focus to the picking of medicinal plants during what would normally be a peak farming season.

“These forest dwellers would ideally cultivate crops like corn, beans, and rare sheep, but in the past few years we’ve seen a change in the climate of the region — the winters are too harsh and long, and summers too humid and short,” said Malik.

He explained that increasingly cold temperatures through May are impeding the movement of livestock up the hills to graze, and that heavy rains makes farming hard enough that people “turn to other work, like helping smugglers unintentionally.”

However, Dr Bilal Teli, an assistant professor at the Government Degree College Budgam, which is affiliated with University of Kashmir, is more alarmed about the unwanted weeds that have begun to cover the slopes normally used for farming.

“We have seen an enormous growth of lophanthus in the past three or four years on the slopes used to cultivate crops,” he said. “This wild plant has impacted agricultural cultivation to a great extent, as it hampers the growth of all other plants. Every year we see it spreading over a greater area.”

While Teli said he does not yet know why there is this explosive growth of the plant, he recognized that it has pushed people into other work in order to survive. And that other work is not always legal, let alone good for the environment.

Smuggling and exploitation

While several explanations account for the plants’ decline — such as road construction, pollution, and environmental stress — smuggling remains the main cause. Kashmir has a rich depository of non-timber plants, which are used in aromatherapy, cosmetics, and medicines.The demand for these plants from Europe, China, Japan, and beyond have turned Kashmir into a place rife with smugglers, even during the global coronavirus pandemic.

Initially, smugglers started extracting trillium south of Jammu and Kashmir, in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, in 2012. After the plant began to vanish there, they shifted their focus to Kashmir. Smugglers then began to hire local Gujjars and Bakerwals — indigenous forest-dwelling people in Kashmir — to help them pick.

The smugglers are not only exploiting nature, but the forest inhabitants as well.

“Forest dwellers have no proper income, so they do all kinds of work,” said Malik. “They do not understand the long-term impact of this activity or are not aware about the value of these plants. For example, smugglers engage them and pay them around $30 for a kilogram of trillium, [then] ultimately sell it for around $1,000 to $1,200.”

But Parvez Ahmad Wani, a district forest officer, refuted claims of smuggling. “Forest dwellers have rights to forest resources for their own use, but not for the purpose of trade, and there are mechanisms and laws in place to curb any illegal activity,” he said.

Abdul Hameed, a member of the Bakerwal community, collects these medicinal plants and sells them to an intermediary, but said he doesn’t know what happens to them after that. He is just doing what he needs to do to keep his family fed. And he doesn’t see how he can do much about the dwindling of these precious plants.

“We are dependent on forests for our livelihood,” he said. “I have a family of eight and I just worry about feeding them. We have no other resources to survive. I am an illiterate person — how would I know what is meant by the ‘environment,’ and how do you think I can protect it?”