Mitali Gupta¹, Subir Kumar Khawas^2,

The weeds grow spontaneously in the crop fields, gardens, railway tracks, roadside and near water bodies etc. without demanding any proper care and nourishment. They are generally regarded as enemy of crops but they also provide huge benefits to mankind. The present paper emphasizes on some of the importance of the common weeds of Hazaribag district of Jharkhand. An ethnomedical survey was conducted in different areas of Hazaribag district in different seasons for two consecutive years (2019-21) to identify the medicinal properties of the weeds through folk lore claims of villagers and traditional healers and standard literatures. A total of 45 medicinal weeds belonging to 21 families were identified. The study revealed that these weeds have huge potency of treating various serious ailments and if proper awareness and information given to the farmers and local people then these can provide to an additional source of income. These plants are actually a heritage of traditional Indian system of medicine so we need to protect them from their exclusion out of ignorance and consequently extinction.

weeds, tribes, medicinal value, Hazaribag, awareness, income