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The Indian subcontinent represents one of the greatest emporia of ethnobotanical wealth. Here many living groups of peoples, still more or less isolated from the influences of the modern world and who continue do live in close association and vital dependance on their vegetation, provide opportunities to the scientist for profound research. Besides, India also presents variety of meterological and climatic conditions, as well as flora. This vast region, therefore offer unique combination of situations and circumstances to carryout ethnobotanical researches. Ethnobotany deals with the relationship between human societies and plants. It has been recognised as a multidisciplinary science comparising many interesting and useful aspects of plant science, history, anthropology, culture and literature. It's importance has been realised chiefly in respect of the varied economic uses of plants among the primitive human societies. It brings to light numerous little known or unknown uses of plants, some of which have potential of wider usage. Ethnologies on tribes living in different parts of the world, works on indigenous medicines and botany and sometimes even forestry and travel accounts contain data of ethnobotanical significance. It also includes material, cultural and madico-religious relationship of the tribes with the plants around their dwellings. India is very rich in ethnobotanical information about 80 percent of populations lives in villages, with a rough estimate indian sub-continent is

2 inhabited by over 550 tribal communities beloning to different ethnic group living in remote forest areas. The different traditions, believes, and cultures of the various tribes and the diversity of the flora in India richly contribute to plant folklores. With the advent of technological progress of the so called civilized societies, the age old cultures of tribal communities have now threatened an extinction. Their age old, time tested cultural values, rich traditional skills and above all the oral folklore knowledge system are fast disappearing and are likely to be lost for ever. This phenomenon has caused a great concern to the scientists as well as the government agencies leading to facing this challenge and to conserve this valuable knowledge and wisdom of the tribals/ aboriginal communities for the posterity. One way of fighting this challenge is concerned with ethnobiology which obviously includes the folklores of plants as well as animals since this endeavour is related with plants, hence only ethnobotancial considerations are included whose multidiscioplinary facets include anthropology, medical and economic botany, besides the other usual branches. De (1968) has rightly regarded ethnobotany as the study of interrelationship between the people and the plants. The practical knowledge of various uses of plants may be obtained either by, a thorough survey of the literature and/or by field studies among primitive people. The study of plants amongst the primitive people is now receiving much attention from botanists and other research workers through out the world besides, the aboriginals have also learnt about the traditional treatment of diseases by the method of trial

3 and error and more often than not, at the heavy cost of human life. The term primitive or aboriginal refers to the indigenous people of the region with little or no technological development, no written language. having a distinct culture of their own and living in small. and economically isolated groups(Jain, 1967). These primitive people still prefer to live in perfect dependence on nature and solved their problems following their own traditional method such studies constitute the science of ethnobotany. Considering the importance of ethnobotany Schultes (1960) has rightly pointed out the urgent need is to findout ways and means to salvege the ethnobotancial-lores before it becomes for ever entombed with the culture that gave it birth. In recent years some efforts have been made for organised ethnobotancial investigation in different parts of this country by various workers including Ahluwalia (1952), Gupta (1960.1962), Jain (1963 a,b.c. 1965). Jain & Tarafder (1963,1970), Shah and Joshi (1971). Jain et. al. (1973), Maheshwar et al. (1980), Tiwari et. al. (1980 a,b), Rao and Neogi (1980) Kharkengar and Joseph (1981). Patel et al. (1981). Uniyal and Malhotra (1981). Kumar (1982). Kapur and Sarin (1983), Krishna and Das (1983). Singh (1983). Singh et al (1984). Sharma and Lakshminarasimhan (1986), Baruah & Sarma (1987). Rawat and Pangtey (1987). Vartak & Kulkarni (1987). Oommachan & Masih (1987). Mandal & Yonzone (1988). Oommachan and Masih (1989). Sharma (1990), Shukla et. al. (1991). Khanna and Mudgal (1992), Sahoo and Mudga (1993). Aminuddin and Girach (1993). Singh and Maheshwar (1993)

4 Srivastava (1994), Singh et. al. (1994). Singh and Anand Prakash (1994), Girach and Aminuddin (1995). Varma et. al. (1995), Saini (1996). Singh and Anand Prakash (1996), Khanna et al. (1996), Painuli and Maheshwari (1996). Maheshwari (1996), Anand Kumar (1996), Das (1997), Vivek Kumar and jain (1998), Kumar et al. (1998), Shrivastava et al. (1999), Maiti and Mishra (2000) Sivakoti and Sivakoti (2000), Khanna and Ramesh kumar (2000). With the perusal of foregoing literature it has revealed that no systematic and sustained ethnobotanical surveys of Bundelkhand region have been undertaken except the works of saxena (1983). There are many forest areas in Bundelkhand region which are inhabited by tribals like Kols, Gonds, Lodhies, Sahariyas, Mogia and Nath etc. These tribes live in remote areas of the region in deep forest and in other localities, provide a good scope for the studies of their folk-lores and folk claims. The systematic ethnobotanical studies on these primitive people may be helpful in the explanation and exploitation of plant resources of this area. However, some aspects of ethnobotanical works on Kols, Gonds and Lodhies tribes of Bundelkhand region have been carried out by Saxena (1993). The ethnobotanical studies of 'Nath' aboriginal people remain untouched. 'Nath' is the aboriginal people of the central provices wandering jugglers and rope dancers (Sherring, 1974). This tribe is distributed in various parts of Bundelkhand region (Teekamgarh, Chhatarpur. Banda, Hamirpur, Jhansi, Mahoba & Jalaun districts).