August 2007 Edition
Umesh Anand
New Delhi
IT was a cold and grey winter’s day in Delhi in December 2002. But if the weather outside was lousy, it was nowhere near being as bleak as Janak Rawal felt within as he squirmed in his chair before a senior officer of the National Medicinal Plants Board. The officer cursorily flipped through Rawal’s newly released Medherb Green Pages and then, with a dismissive arrogance that comes easily when in government, dropped the publication in the wastepaper basket near his table. Rawal had gone to seek official endorsement for India’s first commercial directory of medicinal plants and the many businesses that have mushroomed around them. Medherb Green Pages linked traders, producers of herbal medicines and growers. It also reproduced and explained legislation and rules.
For a rapidly expanding industry worth billions of dollars internationally Rawal believed he had created a useful tool. But as he picked up the directory from the wastepaper basket and left, he felt crushed. He had spent his savings and accumulated sizeable debts to launch the directory. Now if it did not have the approval of the National Medicinal Plants Board, chances were that the directory wouldnot find acceptance. That night, he recalls, he burrowed in his quilt and wept. But he need not have felt so hopeless. Four years later, Rawal’s publication is popular and respected. It is relied upon for deciphering the government’s policies. Its 5,000 subscribers represent just about everyone in the herbals business. His most loyal subscribers are invariably entrepreneurs who have had no guidance on the commercial and scientific aspects of medicinal plants. They don’t know enough about international standards. Thedirectory helps them do all this. It enables them to source raw materials and identify buyers and sellers. Medherb Green Pages also provides information on other countries such as the Netherlands, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal. It is a platform for business to-business advertising, which clearly brings in handsome revenues. India is rich in medicinal plants. It also has a long tradition in herbal medicine.
But there has been little effort to leverage these advantages. Several voluntary organisations do fine work in promoting cultivation,preserving species and encouraging communities to keep old knowledge alive. But such efforts are mostly disaggregated.Commercial information is particularly lacking. The result is that India, though the land of Ayurveda, has only a small share of the global business in herbal remedies. Standardisation, packaging, certification and so on have been mostly neglected. With business disorganised and the government mired in bureaucracy, the cultivation of medicinal plants has been neglected. In addition, there has been unscientific exploitation of the wilds. The absence of regulation has resulted in a free-for-all. The quality of extracts is frequently called into question. Indian firms aren’t equipped to meet norms in developed markets. It is this huge gap in information that Medherb Green Pages has sought to fill. “It is undoubtedly a yeomen service of an enterprising individual,” says Darshan Shankar, the director of the much respected Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT), Bangalore.“
In respect of the Indian traditional medicine industry, Rawal has put together representative information on traders, manufacturers,economic indices, plants in trade and so on,” explains Darshan. “Such information was not available in one place. It isalso difficult to obtain because the industry is relatively unorganised.” Says Dr GG Gangadharan, a vaidya who used to be at the Arya Vaidya Pharmacy and is now at FRLHT: “Rawal has created something very useful for industry. It did not exist before and was needed to make people aware. He is a hardworking man who has painstakingly gone around collecting information. When he came to me 10 years ago, he did not know what a medicinal plant looked like. But he learnt with a lot of dedication.” Rawal’s story is really quite amazing. He drifted from home in the early nineties and landed at the Vivekananda Girija Kalyan Kendra in Karnataka where Dr H Sudarshan took him on as an accounts clerk for a project on setting up an herbal medicine plant in a tribal area. One thing led toanother. When hands were short, the Dr Sudarshan asked the accounts clerk to learn about medicinal plants and develop herbal products. For his initiation he was sent off to meet Dr Gangadharan at the Arya Vaidya Pharmacy in Coimbatore. He learnt from scratch under the guidance of Dr Gangadharan and worked at Dr Sudarshan’s project. After about a year, he left and joined FRLHT as a consultant. Here his role was to collect data on medicinal plants and their cultivation from across India.“I travelled from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from Calcutta to Bombay,” recalls Rawal. “There was no place I did not visit, no business, no NGO that I left out.” His interactions at FRLHT and at the Arya Vaidya Pharmacy introduced Rawal to the science and tradition behind medicinal plants. But it was the extensive travelling and networking that finally proved to be very valuable. In 1999, he returned to Delhi and the family house inAshok Vihar.
He helped conduct a survey on medicinal plants on the Indo- Nepal Border for WWF and also got assignments from FRLHT. But by then he was deep into putting together the Medherb Green Pages. He needed Rs 14 lakhs of which he had Rs 6 lakhs in personalsavings. He was hopeful that the rest would come through advance advertising.“I hit the road and went back to all those people I had been meeting earlier, but I could barely raise Rs 2 lakhs in advertising. So I borrowed and borrowed and finally borrowed to repay loans,” says Rawal. He got out Medherb Green Pages but was Rs 10 lakhs in debt. Marketing his product was the next challenge and with the kind of rebuff he received at the National Medicinal Plants Board, it did not seem an easy task. But just as Rawal feared he had hit rock bottom, he visited Hyderabad for a trade fair and sold all the copies that he had taken with him. He alsocame back with orders worth several lakhs of rupees. Miraculously having pulled back from the edge of bankruptcy, Rawal forged ahead with the same tenacity and energy that he had showed while learning about medicinal plants. Today each copy of Medherb Green Pages sells for Rs 1,000 and he has more advertising than he can accommodate. So, has a single small businessbuilt on a dream done more for Indian medicinal plants and the herbals industry than many projects by NGOs and the government? Do complex causes gain more from high voltage entrepreneurial talent than they do from funded voluntary efforts that don’t tend to fighthard enough for mind space and financial viability? Is the need to profit an essential element in attempts to do good and serve the publicinterest? These aren’t easy questions to answer. Causes such as the promotion of medicinal plants do need support and thatmostly has to come in the form of a subsidy, as Dr G. Balachander, Representative of the Ford Foundation, points out. Viability however is essential and that requires the entrepreneurial spirit. So, it is a combination of vision, pragmatism and social relevance --- which is what any honest business should seek to achieve.
Rawal says he has never bothered with the larger questions. He is a doer. Dr Balachander came across Rawal first in Karnataka inthe nineties and he remembers him sitting in a room full of people and not uttering a word. He is not much different these days. AndMedherb Green Pages, by attracting buyers in India and abroad continuously for four years, really speaks for itself.
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