Global market for medicinal plants is growing exponentially as plant materials are being increasingly used both in developing countries and in the industrialized world. Today there is a substantial market for herbal drugs both as traditional medicines and in modern medicine. Their widespread availability and lack of effective machinery to regulate manufacturing practices and quality standards have raised concerns over the safety and efficacy of such unregulated availability and usage. Urgent need to develop uniform standards to ensure quality of herbal drugs has resulted in the drafting of model guidelines by WHO to define basic criteria for the evaluation, safety and efficacy of herbal medicines. Several standards prescribed in pharmacopoeias, formularies, WHO and ESCOP monographs and herbal drug PDRs are rigidly being followed by regulatory authorities world over. Such standards include various physicochemical, biological and analytical evaluation techniques. Modern instrumental analytical methods on HPTLC, HPLC, GC and other hyphenated techniques are being developed to standardize multi-constituent complexes of herbal drugs. Formulating uniform standards applicable to herbal drugs in general still seems an arduous task. Meanwhile indiscriminate use of herbs, unlike the closely monitored traditional medicine usage of yesteryears, is clearly an unsafe and questionable practice. Reported adverse and toxic effects of several commonly used herbs and their potential interaction with modern medicines and even some dietary articles have raised alarm over their unsupervised sale and usage. Hence quality control and standardization of botanicals must be the topmost priority if the global demand for safe and effective herbal drugs is to be rightly capitalized upon.