From the introduction: "The first edition of The Wealth of India--A Dictionary of Indian Raw Materials and Industrial Products comprising 11 volumes with two supplements dealing with the Raw Materials, and 9 volumes covering the Industrial Products was completed in 1976. The high commendation the work received from leading scientists and scientific journals both in India and abroad was encouraging as well as gratifying.

"Since the publication of the earlier volumes of the first edition of The Wealth of India, there has been a phenomenal progress in scientific research and surveys on India's natural resources, resulting in a vast accumulation of data. This fact, combined with the persistent demand for updated information from the users of this encyclopaedic work, made it imperative to bring out a revised and enlarged edition of the Raw Materials Series. Since the revision envisaged not only updating of the published articles, but also the inclusion of additional plants which had been worked on and had become economically important, the basic work on bibliographic search for these new entries had to be done from scratch.

Although volume 1 of the first edition covered the alphabets A-B, the staggering amount of new, published information on Indian raw materials has necessitated splitting volume I of this revised edition into two parts, IA and IB. A statistical analysis of the revised volume IA of The Wealth of India has revealed that there has been almost a 35 per cent increase in the number of articles compared to the first edition (204 main entries under the the alphabet A as against 153 in the first edition). Vol. IA of the revised edition covers 513 pages of text matter as against 142 pages (under A) of the old edition. There has been, on an average, a 10-15-fold increase in the bibliographic references consulted for the major articles (from 110 in the first edition to 1060 in the revised version for Acacia; 125 to 1925 for Arachis and 35 to 450 for Azadirachta, to cite a few examples). There has been almost a 5-fold increase in the number of books, and a 4-fold increase in the number of journals, cited for the current volume.

The present tome includes 198 genera of plants and 6 entries on minerals. The plants have been arranged in the alphabetical order of their generic and specific names and the minerals according to their common English names. The first edition of The Wealth of India has been cited as the base reference for each entry. For citing the periodicals, the practices followed internationally for journal citation have been adopted mostly, with minor in-house style adaptations where necessary. For the greater convenience of the users, the index has been categorised into (1) Botanical names; (2) Zoological names; (3) Active principles and other important chemical compounds; and (4) Names in Indian languages, regional, trade and common English names."