By Knut-Erik Helle
(Text and photo)

It is early morning in the village Bangain in Chitwan. The healer Shovan Mahato have collected the plants he needs for the scheduled home-visits he has this morning. A young woman has problems with her menstruation period, and while chanting holy mantras - Shovan quickly prepares a red extract from the bark of the “pipal”-tree. A gorau of the Tharu people is both a healer and a priest. According to them, the healing power is both due to the plants and the holy ritual – where the protector of the forest diversity, the forest goddess “Bandevi”, is praised. If the woman is cured, she goes to Shovan Mahato to make him sacrifice a pigeon and rice to the goddess of nature that cured her with the divine natural diversity of the forest. Shovan goes on to the next house that has chosen him as their healer. A mother is worried about her child that does not stop crying. “If we can’t help with our skills, we send our patients to the doctor in town,” Nanda Ram Mahato explains. He learned his skills as a healer from Shovan, and he has about 15 houses he cares for. Most often it is the children of the villages that need the services of the healers. Ailments like diarrhoea and other digestive problems are most frequent. In addition around 1800 different species of medical plants are used to cure or ail headache, burns, fever, small pox, toothache, asthma, chest pains, ring worm, dysentery, heatstroke fever, scabies, pneumonia, bone fracture, cough, snake poisoning and much more.


Kept a secret


Among the most amazing claimed skills of the Tharu goraus, is their knowledge of “family planning” properties of several plants. One jungle plant can bring about abortion.
“There has to be very good reasons when we help make a woman abort. We ask a lot of questions,” Nanda Ram Mahato says. Another healer knows about a plant that makes both men and woman permanent infertile. “He has taken the treatment himself, and he has got no more children,” Nanda Ram Mahato tells. The healer in question confirms that he has not got any more children after the potent cure, when we meet him in another village. Only a few Tharu-healers know about the potent “family-planning”-plants, and they whish to keep it that way.

The unique traditional medical knowledge of the gorau is under sustained pressure. Young men in the villages are not interested to learn the art of healing, even if they still believe in the practice and skills of the healers. In addition, the time consuming practice give little in return to make a living of, and the healers have to have other work as well. The young people find it too difficult to keep the old tradition alive.

For the Tharu people it could be the beginning of the end for their traditional medical knowledge. Also forestry and illegal commercial harvesting pose a threat to the survival of some important species. As that is not enough, western pharmaceutical corporations and university researchers have open access to prospect on both traditional knowledge and the medicine plants in Nepal, looking for clues to make new commercial drugs. Due to lack of proper law regulated access to the biological diversity and indigenous knowledge, the prospectors can do this without giving any benefit to the poor country and it’s people.


Unique diversity threatened

Nepal has a unique diversity with its varied landscape, with a fauna ranging from sub-tropical climate in the low lands to high mountain areas. The diversity of medical herb knowledge follows the nature, with myriads of different healing systems using different plants. Nepal has about 70 ethnical people with their own traditional knowledge of the healing powers of the plants where they live. In addition, Tibetan medicine is practiced by some communities in the Himalaya region, and the Ayurvedic tradition, with about 3500 medical recipes is also much used. The vedic scriptures especially prise the highly potent medical plants of the Himalaya.

“Commercial harvesting of herbs is a big problem.We have many species, but there is few specimen of each. Large amounts is harvested and illegally taken to India and distributed internationally, a practice that threaten a number of species,” biologist and herb-medicine expert Dr. Tirtha Bahadur Shrestha tells. The ongoing military maoist insurgency also affects the bio-diversity in a serious way. “Both maoist and government forces clear the forest bed to gain a better view. This threatens many plants with medical properties”, the biologist explains. Another threat from the war is that illegal commercial export and harvesting of valuable medicine herbs has become easier as the Nepalese army can’t provide sufficient protection to guard the natural resources of the country. The timber harvesting and management of the forests pose yet another threat.

“We’ll have to focus on other resources in our forests besides timber. For the local communities non-timber products of the forests has a larger value then the timber,” according to Shrestha.

Everything from wild-vegetables to animal fodder is gathered from the forests by the local communities. Often they end up in conflicts with timber prospectors, just interested in logging as many trees they can get their chainsaws on. The Tharu goraus are facing growing problems finding some of the plants they depend on. Together with healer Nanda Ram Mahato we spent more than half an hour searching for the important serpentine-plant (Rauvolfia serpentine), that is used to ail burns, snakebite, fever and cure small pox. Forestry and pressure from a growing poor population has contributed to endangering about 20 medical plant species in the lowland of the Tharu people, according to Dr. Shrestha. The healers have to go deeper and deeper into the jungle to find their plants, as more forests are ecologically degraded.


Herb hunting Bio-pirates


Western pharmaceutical companies and scientists from different research institutions are ransacking the planet looking for active medical compounds in thousands of plants, which potentially can be used to develop new drugs. When they let traditional knowledge guide them to plants with known medical properties, the chance of making interesting findings becomes much bigger. Scientists and corporation preying on indigenous knowledge seldom share any benefit with the local communities of origin, as few countries have regulated access to their genetic diversity and knowledge of their people. The Wapishana, an indigenous people living in the Amazon between Brazil and Guyana, have now banned visits by any researchers to their villages. They feel betrayed by scientists that they have shared their ancestral knowledge and practice with, discovering that foreign corporations have claimed patent rights to their heritage without any benefits for the communities. According to ETC Group, an Non Government Organization (NGO) based in Canada, corporations and OECD countries are investing millions of dollars in biological prospecting and analyses of genetic plant resources. The products arising from their explorations have a value of several billion dollars a year, the NGO claims. Nepal shares the challenge with many other countries in the South rich in biological diversity, but with no laws that secure benefit sharing from bioprospecting.

“Today all doors and windows are open in Nepal for western scientists and companies to take what they want,” Dr. Tirtha Bahadur Shrestha states. As long as Nepal is without proper laws he is reluctant to call the prospectors “bio-pirates”. But he challenges the ethics of university scientists that do research on plants in Nepal, and then collaborate with private pharmaceutical companies.
Shivcharn S. Dhillion, a professor at the Agricultural University of Norway, ties the concept of biopirates to exploitation of traditional knowledge in the South.

“The traditional communities in the South have to be given more rights and the possibility to decide over their own knowledge. This local knowledge and generations of innovations must be recognized,” the professor says. He stresses the need of a system between North and South that can amount to more trust among the stakeholders, so that cases like the one with the Amazon Wapishana people can be avoided.


Academic rescue for the Gorau?


Nanda Ram Mahato has begun a fight to save both the traditional knowledge of his people and threatened medicine plants the healers depend on. His work could also prove significant when western pharmaceutical prospectors arrive to prey on their knowledge. He is working together with Dr. Dharma Dangol of Rampur Agricultural College.

“The Tharu healers are very innocent when it comes to exploitation of their medical knowledge. They want to share with anyone,” Dangol says. His hope is that documentation of the Tharu-knowledge both can help save it for the future and provide some academic recognition of their ancestral heritage, making it more difficult for prospectors to take advantage of their knowledge. Nanda Ram Mahato has written a handbook for healers on the use of important medicine plants, in order to document the unique knowledge before it is lost. He has also collected 1800 specimen of medical plants for a Tharu healer herbarium together with Dangol, and a botanical garden with important medicine plants has been established. They have also interviewed a large number of Tharu healers, about their knowledge and their use of medical plants.

Both hope that their efforts on documenting the traditional medical knowledge will create new interest among young Tharu people in the skills of the gorau, and moreover contribute to a better forest management that will protect the large diversity of medical plants found in the Tarei region.

2003 (C) Knut-Erik Helle / FIOH / NEFEJ