Distribution and habitat: Throughout India, upto 5,400 m, as a weed along roadsides and waste places.

Botany: An annual or perennial, prostrate herb with many slender, spreading branches and silky villous young parts. 

• Leaves : Abruptly simple, paripinnate and opposite, leaflets 5-8 pairs, subequal, oblong to linear-oblong, mucronate, pubescent on both surfaces.
• Flowers:  Bright yellow in colour, solitary and pseudo-axillary or leaf opposed.
• Fruits : Globose, consisting of 5 woody mericarps with 2 long and 2 short spines.
• Seeds : many in each coccus.

Properties:

• The roots and fruits are sweet, cooling, diuretic, aphrodisiac, emollient, digestive, anthelmintic, cardiotonic and expectorant.
• The leaves are diuretic, anthelmintic, aphrodisiac and depurative.
• The seeds are cooling, diuretic, anti-inflammatory, strengthening and aphrodisiac.

Chemical constituents: Kaempferol, campesterol, stigmasterol, amino acids, alkaloids harmine, cinnamic amides derivatives etc. 

Uses:

• The roots and fruits are useful in anorexia, consumption, cardiopathy, scabies, ophthalmia etc.
• The leaves are used in skin diseases, strangury, inflammations etc.
• The seeds are useful in epistaxis, urinary troubles and ulcerative stomatitis.

Propagation:  The plant can be propagated by seeds.