Directory of Indian Economic Plants

The present revision of the Economic Plants of India has a vivid introduction describing plants exploited in homeopathic medicines, tinctures, weeds that effect crop plants, house plants, plants as sources of energy, plants that check pollution, ethnobotanical reports and a index of common names besides all that was in the Economic Plants of India by the same author. This will enable non botanists, Kaviraj and traders also to search for their correct product and find newer sources of plant materials. There has been a series of changes for the last 25 years in the nomenclature of various plants, their families etc. after being adopted in the Botanical Congress depending on the availability of specimens which were already named, hence the priority basis the first name described by the author has become valid name whereas the later described name becomes synonyms. Efforts have been made to included latest valid names in this work in bold and the invalid names in italics. So far as the family names are concerned, Leningrad Botanical Congress recommended to change the names of families and assigned a new name based on a common, popular name of the genera in a family. Dr. H. Santapau was entrusted with this job but in 1971 his health did not permit to look to these changes. Thus the work was assigned to botanists of Kew gardens who have changed Umbelliferae as Apiaceae, Compositae as Asteraceae, Cruciferae as Brassicaceae, Guttiferae as Clusiaceae, Labiatae as Lamiaceae. These all the families whose taxa has been changed are all after their respective genera e.g. Apium, Aster, Brassica, Clusiana, Lamium but 2000 Botanical Congress has objected these names as they are not cosmopolitan as compared to Corriandrum in Umbelliferae, Tagates/Helianthus in Compositae, Garcinia in Clusiaceae, Salvia in Labiatae etc. The author therefore has adopted century old family names in italics to check the confusion in non taxonomists but in the index of the families, latest names have been incorporated under roman letters.