Synopsis India is perhaps the largest producer of medicinal herbs and is rightly called the "Botanical Garden of the World". There are very few medicinal herbs of commercial importance, which are not collected of cultivated in this country. Medicinal herbs have been in use for thousands of years, in one form or another, under the indigenous systems of medicine like Ayurveda, Sidha and Unani, since independence in 1947, India has made tremendous progress in agrotechnology, process technology, standardisation, quality control, research and development etc. India has 15,000-18,000 species of flowering plants, 2500 algae, 23000 fungi, 1,600 types of litchen, 1, 800 varieties of bryophytes and an estimated 30 million types of micro-organisms.