Gender in the management of indigenous knowledge: reflections from Indian Central Himalaya

In the Indian Central Himalaya, indigenous knowledge is an important natural resource that has enormous potential to facilitate the development process in cost-effective and sustainable ways. It governs almost all important productive resource sectors and revolves around traditional values of resource use. In this study, covering nineteen settlements and as many as 500 respondents drawn equally from both sexes, an effort was made to understand the indigenous knowledge of both sexes through documentation of indigenous system of medicine and health-care practices. The study revealed that women are the real custodians of the indigenous knowledge system, as 52% of them have knowledge on thirty practices against that of 26% for males.