India can grow almost every medicinal plant the global wellness industry is paying premium prices for right now. Ashwagandha, tulsi, turmeric, moringa, brahmi and shatavari are some of those in demand. The demand is real, the market numbers are serious, and most of these plants are native here. On paper, this should be a straightforward income story for Indian farmers.
In practice, it isn’t. And the reasons behind this phenomenon are worth being honest about.
I spend a lot of my time sourcing these ingredients. What I’ve learned is that the price a farmer receives for ashwagandha root and the price a brand pays for the same ashwagandha can differ by a factor of ten or more. The plant is grown on the farm. The value is captured almost everywhere else through the supply chain.
So when we say medicinal botanicals are an income opportunity for farmers, we have to be specific about what we mean. Growing the plant is not the opportunity. Growing it in a way the modern supply chain will actually pay for that is the opportunity. And right now, very few Indian farmers are deft to do the second thing.
The honest version of the problem has three parts to it.
The three parts
First, most medicinal plants in India are still treated as a secondary crop or harvested from the wild. Quality varies batch to batch. Active compound content swings wildly. This is why serious buyers, including Indian brands, often end up importing ashwagandha or turmeric extracts from more organized supply chains abroad, despite the plant being native here. That should bother us.
The second problem lies in lack of standardization. The premium in this category is not paid for the plant. It’s paid for the plant with ‘verified content’ a la withanolides in ashwagandha, curcumin in turmeric, eugenol in tulsi. At present, that testing happens far from the farm. Which is also the reason why the margin ends up far from the farm too. Until shared testing infrastructure exists at a cluster or FPO level, the farmer will keep selling a commodity while someone else sells a standardised ingredient. The same will now sell at ten times the price.
Third foremost problem is lack of collective. A single farmer selling 200 kilos of anything has no negotiating power in this market. Brands like ours need consistency, traceability, and volume. A farmer acting alone can’t offer any of those. A collective of 500 farmers can. We have to bring about an Amul moment , which created history decades back by clustering farmers. In 1980s , legendary Verghese Kurien democratised an entire supply chain.
Template works
None of this is theoretical. There are ashwagandha clusters running in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan doing exactly this, with contract buyers locked in. Turmeric and cardamom clusters in Kerala and Karnataka are further along. The template works. It just hasn’t been built out at the scale the current decade is going to demand.
The intense demand wave in Indian wellness is arriving whether the farm is ready or not. Brands will need serious volumes of clean, tested and traceable botanical ingredients over the next five to ten years. If the infrastructure gets built encompassing cultivation practice, testing and aggregation, farmers will become direct and biggest beneficiaries of a democratised supply chain. If it doesn’t, the same plants will keep leaving the country as raw material and coming back as finished product.
Both outcomes are possible, one of them just requires intent.
The author is Founder, Aarus
Published on May 3, 2026