Indian Wildlife, Biodiversity Hotspots and Endemic Species

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Try a few questions now to see which of these three frameworks a statement is quietly testing.