Ethnomedicines of Assam and Meghalaya States in India: An Effort to Create Sustainable Livelihoods Among Tribal Communities via App Agroshadhi

This paper presents a viable solution to bridge the significant gap in the utilization of indigenous medicinal knowl-edge among the tribal communities (TCs), exacerbated by their economic challenges, particularly in the scheduled tribes (STs) of the north-eastern states in India. Apparently, through empirical studies, the traditional knowledge of medicinal plant species has been insufficiently tapped owing to non-commercialization and scaling-up, discarding the proven clinical and pharmacological efficacy. To effectively tackle this multifaceted issue, our solution involves the development of an Android application (App named Agroshadhi) equipped with a diverse range of features, designed to streamline user interaction and enhance accessibility to traditional healthcare solutions. The App has been developed using the Android Studio and Google Firebase for a scalable and reliable realization of data provision, authentication, and content delivery based on its real-time database, cloud storage, authentication, and hosting capabilities. The task of the App entails the TCs to post data on native drugs via a trained middleman App-operator which shall further flow this data towards critical evaluation, validation, marketing, and electronic (e) payments. Consequently, effective management of traditional drug knowledge transfer has been prototyped and presented in this work via an App for more than 300 ethnomedicines obtained via snowball sampling and baseline data capture through field surveys and workshops in Assam and Meghalaya states of India.