Forests constitute a rich repository of medicinal plants that are being used by various indigenous health care systems and form an important source of income to many forest dwelling communities. However, because of indiscriminate use of the resources over time and fragmentation of habitats, many of these species are increasingly threatened and are facing the risk of becoming genetically impoverished. It is estimated that about 70-80 out of 300 species are either severely endangered or threatened. It is imperative that viable strategies to conserve the surviving populations and their genetic resources of at least the critically important species are formulated to arrest further loss.

            India has rich biodiversity and one among the twelve mega diversity centers, where the growing demand of medicinal plant species is putting a heavy strain on the existing species to be either threatened or in endangered category. About 90% of medicinal plants used by industries are collected from the wild for which 70% of the plant collections involve destructive harvesting because of the use of parts like roots, bark, wood, stem and the whole plant in case of herbs. This poses a definite threat to the genetic stocks and to the diversity of medicinal plants. Millions of rural mass also use medicinal plants for various purposes thereby receding the species.

            The plants propagated by vegetative means contain systemic bacteria, fungi and viruses which may affect the quality and appearance of selected items. In recent years, tissue culture has emerged as a promising technique to obtain genetically pure elite populations under in vitro conditions rather than have indifferent populations. Tissue culture has now become a well established technique for culturing and studying the physiological behavior of isolated plant organs, tissues, cells, protoplasts and even cell organelles under precisely controlled physical and chemical conditions. Most of the medicinal plants either do not produce seeds or seeds are too small and do not germinate in soils. Thus mass multiplication of disease free planting material is a general problem. In this regard the micropropagation holds significant promise for true to type, rapid and mass multiplication under disease free clonal propagation techniques using shoot tip and nodal segments are must for mass-scale multiplication and conservation of an endangered or threatened and medicinally important species within short period and limited space. Due to ever growing demand, the availability of medicinal plants to the pharmaceutical companies is not enough to manufacture herbal medicines. Therefore few things must be done as:

• Conservation of medicinal plants existing in the forest for future generations.
• Collecting of seeds for future propagation in other areas suitable for medicinal plants.
• Development of scion material for vegetative propagation.
• Introduction of valuable medicinal plants from out side into the conservation area.