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At the Hatiya weekly market in Dumka district, Jharkhand, Rupa Soren, 52, sits cross-legged on the bare ground, a spread of dark leafy greens arranged before her on a worn cloth. She holds up a stem. “Khoon badhta hai, taqat aati hai (the blood increases, strength comes),” she said. 

She is selling them for Rs 40 per quarter kilogram. Around her, the market hums with the sounds of motorcycles, vendors and children, but the pile in front of Soren draws little attention from shoppers who walk past without a second glance. Most do not know what it is.

The plant Soren has gathered since childhood is known to botanists as ludwigia adscendens, a semi-aquatic herb found along paddy field margins and forest streams across eastern India. Ethnobotanical research confirms what she has known intuitively for decades: the species is high in iron and antioxidants and has long been used in tribal medicine to address anaemia and improve haemoglobin levels. Science, in other words, has finally caught up.

However, this knowledge is rapidly disappearing.

A woman sells wild leafy greens at a weekly haat in Dumka district. Such greens, gathered from forest margins and wetlands, are consumed locally but rarely recognised in formal food security discussions, Photo: Kulesh Bhandari.

Over the past 13 months, across 20 forest-edge and granite outcrop villages in Dumka district, including Latipahar, Rajapathar, Sahargati, and Gadikoriya and the Sundarpahari region, I have documented documented the use of wild edible plants among Santhal and Adivasi communities in the Santhal Pargana uplands. The findings reveal a pattern that is quiet, unglamorous and deeply worrying.

Community members aged 50 and above were able to identify, on average, more than 40 species of wild edible plants – their seasonal availability, preparation methods, medicinal properties and........

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