Authentication and Quality Evaluation of Herbal Crude Drugs from Indian Markets

Medicinal plants or chemical substances derived from plants are the source of therapeutic ingredients considered important drugs currently in use in the world. In India, the AYUSH system has been included in mainstream healthcare and all these traditional systems of medicine rely on herbal crude drugs. Trading in dried raw plant drugs with no traceability to their origin is quite common in Indian markets. The safety, potency and efficacy of herbal drugs depend upon the use of standardized crude raw drugs. Present study serves as baseline information for herbal drug regulatory authorities to have strict guidelines on the sale of crude drugs and also the need for implementation of Good Agricultural and Collection Practices (GACP). In the present study, 295 market samples of 102 crude drugs were studied for quality standards and genuineness. It was found that 17% of the crude market samples were adulterated and 83% were botanically correct species, as these complied with diagnostic macro-microscopical characters of authentic crude drugs. However, the qualitative analysis indicated that the foreign matter, total ash, acid insoluble ash, and water soluble extractive values of these market samples deviated from authentic samples by 5% to > 15%, indicating thereby that samples collected from market may differ in collection time, storage practices like drying process, storage, time /season of collection and geography which may affect its pharmaceutical quality.