• Botanic Gardens may adopt short, medium and long term conservation strategies for rescue, recovery and rehabilitation of rare, threatened and endangered species.
• The national plant conservation programme and the supporting small grant scheme would be seen as a major contribution of the Indian botanic garden community towards implementation of Target 8 of the GSPC.
• The conservation programme and small grant projects should have a clear focus on rare, endangered and threatened (RET) species, giving due importance to local endemics and monotypic species occurring in the major endemic centers.
• A conservation matrix incorporating relevant data and information on the botanic gardens, the number of RET species recorded and their distribution across the 10 biogeographic zones in India needs to be made.
• The technical manuals, guidelines, action plans, policy documents, case studies, country reports, etc. brought out by BGCI and other concerned international and national organizations might be used as guidelines to implement conservation activities in botanic gardens of India.
• Each Indian botanic garden and the Indian Botanic Garden Network (IBGN) must strive their best to sustain the national conservation programme even after IIN-India support by mobilizing the financial resources and other support facilities from national as well as international funding agencies.

Education- Hand book:

Dr. (Mrs.) Kamla Kulshrestha presented the profile of activities of NBRI Eco-education Group in this session. Participants emphasized that education is a most purposeful activity, which extends from cradle to grave. Botanic gardens should be oriented to provide environmental education in formal and informal ways for the cognitive and psychomotor development of their users.

Fig.6. Dr. (Mrs.) K. Kulshreshtha coordinator of Education: Handbook giving her presentation during the Ist NCBGI session.

For the purpose of printed education manuals and booklets, the languages chosen by delegates were English, Hindi and other major regional languages of India. BGCI will play a crucial role in supplying the course materials, which have already been published earlier but all the case studies will come from India. Target groups for the resource materials will include school children, villagers, farmers, housewives etc. (as specific to the local region).

During the designing of the course-curriculum for school children, it was noted that eco/green-clubs in the schools should be taken into consideration. Teachers are to be educated first, before educating the school children. In due course, it may also include the graduate and post-graduate students. The major focus area of the education will be garden-based-eco-education programme and include gardening, composting and sustainability etc.

Concluding Session:

Fig.7. Participants of the1st -NCBGI

Participants agreed to the release of a statement in the concluding session that summarized the feeling of the meeting and underlined the proposal for the Indian Botanic Gardens Network. The statement is in the printed proposal included with this Newsletter.