Turkmenistan's Positive Neutrality and Its Bilateral Relations: Special Focus on India

Turkmenistan is a Central Asian country that largely depends upon agriculture and is enriched with natural resources like natural gas, petroleum, salt, and sulphur. The country has the sixth-largest natural gas reserves. Since its independence in 1991, the country follows a ‘positive neutrality' policy to avoid external interference in its domestic affairs. The country always acts as a mediator to maintain peace and stability. During the period of Niyazov, he used this neutrality policy to enforce his control over the country and isolate the country from the rest of the world. With the entry of Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow into power in 2006, he tried to liberalize the economy as well as maintain the neutrality policy. So the ‘positive neutrality' adopted by Turkmenistan has had a different impact on its economy during different periods. Along with the isolationist policy, on one hand, Turkmenistan also emphasizes maintaining bilateral relations with other countries. This study is an attempt to analyze Turkmenistan's ‘positive neutrality' policy and its bilateral relations with the other countries with a special focus on India. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.431863

AN OVERVIEW OF ETHNOMEDICINE AND FUTURE ASPECT OF ETHNOMEDICINAL PLANTS

Ethno botanical study is now of immense importance in the field of medical science, it is well established branch of science with much attention. Ethno botany is the scientific relationships that exist between people and plants. Traditional medicine and ethno botanical information play an important role in scientific research, particularly when the literature and field work data have not been properly evaluated. Globally, about 80% of the traditional medicines used for primary health care are derived from plants. In China, traditional medicine accounts for around 40% of all health care delivered. In Chile 71% of the population, and in Colombia 40% of the population, have used such medicine. India is one of the twelve mega-biodiversity countries of the world having rich vegetation with a wide variety of plants with medicinal value. Rural people not only depend on wild plants as sources of food, medicine, fodder and fuel, but have also developed methods of resource management, which may be fundamental to the conservation of some of the world's important habitats. In India, 65% of the populations in rural areas are using medicinal plants to meet their primary health care needs. Here a review on ethnomedicine including correlation of Ethnomedicine and Ayurveda will be mentioned. Attention should be made for proper exploitation, utilization and further reasearches on ethno medicinal important plant species

The Impact of Selective-Logging and Forest Clearance for Oil Palm on Fungal Communities in Borneo

Tropical forests are being rapidly altered by logging, and cleared for agriculture. Understanding the effects of these land use changes on soil fungi, which play vital roles in the soil ecosystem functioning and services, is a major conservation frontier. Using 454-pyrosequencing of the ITS1 region of extracted soil DNA, we compared communities of soil fungi between unlogged, once-logged, and twice-logged rainforest, and areas cleared for oil palm, in Sabah, Malaysia. Overall fungal community composition differed significantly between forest and oil palm plantation. The OTU richness and Chao 1 were higher in forest, compared to oil palm plantation. As a proportion of total reads, Basidiomycota were more abundant in forest soil, compared to oil palm plantation soil. The turnover of fungal OTUs across space, true β-diversity, was also higher in forest than oil palm plantation. Ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungal abundance was significantly different between land uses, with highest relative abundance (out of total fungal reads) observed in unlogged forest soil, lower abundance in logged forest, and lowest in oil palm. In their entirety, these results indicate a pervasive effect of conversion to oil palm on fungal community structure. Such wholesale changes in fungal communities might impact the long-term sustainability of oil palm agriculture. Logging also has more subtle long term effects, on relative abundance of EcM fungi, which might affect tree recruitment and nutrient cycling. However, in general the logged forest retains most of the diversity and community composition of unlogged forest