Indian Wildlife and Biodiversity Hotspots

India sits at the meeting point of several biogeographic realms, which is why a country holding roughly 2.4% of the world's land area carries such an outsized share of its species. UPSC tests this less as trivia and more as three separate frameworks operating side by side: which areas are globally significant (biodiversity hotspots), which species get legal protection and how much (the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972), and how the country's genetic resources and traditional knowledge are regulated (the Biological Diversity Act, 2002, and the Nagoya Protocol). Assuming these three overlap neatly, or that "hotspot" just means "high biodiversity", is where most statement-based questions go wrong.

Two sibling notes cover ground this one deliberately leaves aside: Protected Area Categories and Tiger Reserves covers National Parks, Sanctuaries, Conservation and Community Reserves, Biosphere Reserves, and Project Tiger's core-buffer structure in depth, and Project Elephant, Barasingha and Cheetah Revival covers Project Elephant, human-elephant conflict, and species translocation as a technique. This note stays with the hotspot and endemic-species framework, the two wildlife Acts, and a species this site does not yet cover elsewhere, the Asiatic lion.

Biodiversity hotspots: the criteria, not just "lots of species"

A biodiversity hotspot is a technical, two-part definition, not a loose description of a wildlife-rich place. A region qualifies only if it (1) contains at least 1,500 endemic vascular plant species, species found nowhere else on Earth, and (2) has already lost 70% or more of its original natural vegetation. Both conditions have to hold: a region can be extraordinarily rich in species and still not qualify if it has not lost most of its original habitat, and a badly degraded region does not qualify just because it has been degraded. The framework was developed by the ecologist Norman Myers and later adopted by Conservation International, which is why it identifies places under threat, not simply places that are biodiverse.

India has four of the world's recognised hotspots, and each spans a different kind of terrain:

• Western Ghats and Sri Lanka: the hill chain running along India's west coast, extending into Sri Lanka.
• Himalaya: the entire Indian Himalayan belt, part of a hotspot that also runs through Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Pakistan and Myanmar.
• Indo-Burma: nearly all of Northeast India (excluding the Assam plains), continuing into Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and southern China.
• Sundaland: represented in India only by the Nicobar Islands (not the Andamans), part of a hotspot centred on Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

Endemism in numbers: the Western Ghats as the working example

The Western Ghats are the hotspot UPSC draws the most specific numbers from, and the figures are worth knowing precisely because they show how endemism varies sharply by group, not evenly across all wildlife. Of roughly 650 tree species recorded there, 352 (about 54%) are endemic. Amphibians run even higher, with endemism reaching about 65% of the recorded species, a reflection of how poorly amphibians disperse across dry or altered terrain compared with birds or larger mammals. Reptiles sit around 62% endemic and freshwater fish around 53%. The range carries UNESCO World Heritage status as a serial site made up of 39 separate component parts (tiger reserves, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and reserved forests) grouped into seven sub-clusters, and a 2020 IUCN assessment flagged its conservation outlook as one of "significant concern", driven by habitat fragmentation, plantation encroachment and invasive species rather than any single dramatic threat.

Named species worth anchoring this to: the Nilgiri tahr (a mountain goat found only in the Western Ghats' higher shola-grassland belt), the lion-tailed macaque (restricted to the same range's rainforest canopy), and the purple frog (Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis), often called a "living fossil" because its closest relatives are found only in the Seychelles, evidence of a shared Gondwanan ancestry going back over 100 million years. Further east, the Namdapha flying squirrel, known from a single specimen collected in Arunachal Pradesh's Namdapha National Park, illustrates how the Indo-Burma hotspot's endemism can be so narrow that a species is defined by one location.

Endemic species beyond the Western Ghats

The Western Ghats numbers above are the ones UPSC quotes most often, but the other three hotspots carry their own named endemics worth anchoring separately, precisely because naming a species against the wrong hotspot is a recurring trap in statement-based questions.

The Himalaya hotspot's clearest example is the red panda (Ailurus fulgens), confined within India to the eastern Himalaya's temperate broadleaf and bamboo-understorey forests across Darjeeling, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, roughly between 2,200 and 4,800 metres. Despite sitting in the order Carnivora, it feeds almost entirely on bamboo shoots and leaves, an ecological role closer to a browsing herbivore than a predator. The IUCN's 2015 assessment lists it as Endangered, with its range having contracted by roughly half over the preceding two decades, and it carries Schedule I protection under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, plus CITES Appendix I status internationally.

Indo-Burma supplies two examples worth telling apart. The Namdapha flying squirrel above is known from a single specimen, the narrowest possible endemism. The pygmy hog (Porcula salvania), by contrast, is well studied and carries a genuine recovery story: the world's smallest and rarest wild pig, standing barely 25 cm tall at the shoulder, it survives today only in a handful of tall alluvial grassland patches in and around Manas National Park in western Assam. Captive-breeding and reintroduction work under the Pygmy Hog Conservation Programme pulled it back from a 2008 Critically Endangered listing to Endangered by 2019, a rare instance of an IUCN category improving rather than sliding further down. It has no connection to the Western Ghats and is easy to muddle with that region's small mammals if the two hotspots are not kept apart.

Sundaland, represented in India only by the Nicobar Islands, has its own single-location bird: the Nicobar megapode, or Nicobar scrubfowl (Megapodius nicobariensis), found nowhere outside the Nicobar group. It is notable for a nesting habit rather than its appearance: it never incubates eggs by sitting on them, instead burying them inside large mounds of sand, leaf litter and decomposing vegetation, letting the heat of decomposition do the work. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami destroyed close to two-thirds of the population in a single event, a one-off catastrophic loss that IUCN criteria treat differently from a slow ongoing decline; the species is listed Vulnerable, carries Schedule I status under the 1972 Act, and part of its core range sits inside the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve.

The Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972: what a Schedule actually means

Species-level protection runs through a completely separate law from the hotspot framework, and the two do not map onto each other. Originally the Act carried six Schedules; the Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Act, 2022 restructured this down to four. Schedule I carries the strictest protection (the highest penalties for any offence against these species). Schedule II now covers species needing a comparatively lower, but still real, degree of protection, after being merged with what used to be a separate schedule. Schedule III, previously a distinct schedule for plants, now covers specified plant species. Schedule IV is new: it exists specifically to align India's domestic law with CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, listing species regulated for international trade rather than ranked by rarity. A species' Schedule therefore reflects the level of legal protection, not directly its IUCN conservation status; a Schedule I species is not automatically "more endangered" than a Schedule II one in IUCN terms, the two classifications answer different questions.

The Biological Diversity Act, 2002 and the Nagoya Protocol

This is the law that governs who gets to use India's biological resources and traditional knowledge, and on what terms, a different question again from either hotspots or species protection. It set up a three-tier structure: the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), a statutory body established in 2003 and headquartered in Chennai, which facilitates, regulates and advises the Central Government on conservation and on the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from using biological resources; State Biodiversity Boards (SBBs) at the state level; and Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs) at the level of local bodies, which maintain People's Biodiversity Registers documenting local bioresources and knowledge. India signed and later ratified the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing, the international agreement under the Convention on Biological Diversity that operationalises this "fair and equitable sharing" principle globally, and gave it domestic effect through Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) Regulations notified under the 2002 Act.

Project Lion and the Asiatic lion's single-population risk

The Asiatic lion (Panthera leo persica) is a good closing case for this note because it ties every earlier thread together: a Schedule I species under the 1972 Act, protected in law long before any dedicated project existed, whose entire global wild range sits inside one landscape, a reminder that endemism can be a marker of fragility rather than of thriving diversity.

Hunting had reduced the population to a precarious low by the early 1900s, commonly described as having fallen to a few dozen animals at most, before the Nawab of Junagadh's own hunting ban gave the remaining lions the room to recover through the twentieth century. The environment ministry's own figures trace the modern recovery precisely: 284 lions in 1990, 674 at the 2020 census, and 891 at the most recent, May 2025, estimation, a rise of roughly 32% since 2020 and over 70% across the decade. That population still roams essentially one contiguous landscape across Saurashtra, roughly 35,000 sq km spanning 11 districts of Gujarat, with Gir National Park and its adjoining sanctuaries forming the historic core.

That single-landscape concentration is exactly why a second, geographically separate population has been a conservation priority for decades, not a recent idea. Deciding a public interest petition first filed in 1995, the Supreme Court, on 15 April 2013, directed the Union government to translocate a founder population of lions from Gir to the Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh within six months, reasoning that spreading extinction risk across two sites mattered more than any state's claim over "its" wildlife. That translocation never happened. Kuno instead went on to host an entirely different species, the introduced Southeast African cheetahs of Project Cheetah covered in the sibling note on Wildlife Conservation Efforts, a detail worth holding onto precisely because it runs against intuition: the park now associated with a cheetah reintroduction was originally identified, and judicially ordered, as a second home for a completely different big cat.

Project Lion itself is a separate, more recent initiative. The Prime Minister announced it from the Red Fort on the 74th Independence Day, 15 August 2020, and the environment ministry has since approved it as a ten-year, ₹2,927.71 crore programme covering habitat and population management, wildlife healthcare, mitigating conflict with people living alongside lions, community participation, tourism development and scientific research across the Gir landscape. Rather than the court-ordered Kuno route, an actual second population has begun forming through natural dispersal instead: lions moved on their own into the Barda Wildlife Sanctuary, roughly 190 sq km across Porbandar and Devbhumi Dwarka districts, in 2023, the first time lions had been present there in some 143 years; by August 2025 that population had grown to 17 animals (six adults and eleven cubs). Official messaging calls this the "Greater Gir" concept, an organically emerging second home rather than the engineered relocation the 2013 judgment had envisaged, a framing worth reading critically: a real, welcome population gain, but not the specific remedy the Court actually ordered.

Why this is tested

Examiners like to build statement questions that quietly swap one framework's logic into another: claiming a hotspot designation depends on a species' Schedule, or that a Schedule I animal is necessarily endemic, or that the NBA manages protected areas (it does not; that sits with forest and wildlife departments under the 1972 Act). Keep the three questions separate in your head, area significance, species protection level, and resource-access regulation, and most traps collapse on their own.

A second cluster of traps sits inside endemism itself: naming a genuinely Indian endemic against the wrong hotspot, a red panda placed in the Western Ghats, say, or a pygmy hog described as confined to the Himalaya rather than Indo-Burma's Assam grasslands, reads as plausible only if the four hotspots have been memorised as an undifferentiated list rather than as four separate places with their own named species. The Asiatic lion adds a third, more subtle trap: because Kuno National Park is now famous for cheetahs, a statement can quietly imply that Kuno was always the cheetah's intended home, when the judicial and conservation history runs the other way round, Kuno was identified and court-ordered for lions first, and the lion translocation is what never actually happened. Numbers in this space, lion population counts, elephant reserve tallies, tiger reserve counts and the like, are revised often; treat any specific figure here as accurate to its stated date rather than as a fixed constant.

Quick revision points

• A hotspot needs both 1,500+ endemic vascular plants and 70%+ habitat loss, not just high species richness.
• India's four hotspots: Western Ghats and Sri Lanka, Himalaya, Indo-Burma, Sundaland (represented here only by the Nicobar Islands).
• Western Ghats endemism: about 54% of trees, 65% of amphibians, 62% of reptiles, 53% of freshwater fish.
• The 2022 amendment cut the Wild Life (Protection) Act's Schedules from six to four: I (strictest), II (lower but real protection), III (plants), IV (CITES-regulated trade species).
• Biological Diversity Act, 2002: NBA (national, est. 2003, Chennai), SBBs (state), BMCs (local, maintain People's Biodiversity Registers).
• Nagoya Protocol = the international access-and-benefit-sharing agreement India has given domestic effect to via ABS Regulations under the 2002 Act.
• Named endemics by hotspot: Himalaya, the red panda (Eastern Himalaya, IUCN Endangered, Schedule I); Indo-Burma, the Namdapha flying squirrel (single-specimen endemism) and the pygmy hog (Manas National Park, Assam, recovered from Critically Endangered to Endangered); Sundaland/Nicobar, the Nicobar megapode (mound-nesting, Vulnerable, lost roughly two-thirds of its population to the 2004 tsunami).
• Asiatic lion: population 284 (1990) to 674 (2020) to 891 (May 2025); entire wild range confined to roughly 35,000 sq km across 11 Saurashtra districts, historic core at Gir.
• Supreme Court, 15 April 2013: ordered lion translocation from Gir to Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary, Madhya Pradesh, within six months; never implemented. Kuno instead later hosted the unrelated Project Cheetah.
• Project Lion: announced 15 August 2020; a 10-year, ₹2,927.71 crore MoEFCC programme. A real second population has since formed through natural dispersal into Barda Wildlife Sanctuary (2023 onward, 17 lions by August 2025), the "Greater Gir" concept, distinct from the court-ordered Kuno translocation that never happened.

Try a few questions now to see which of these frameworks, or which named species and hotspot, a statement is quietly testing.