Biodiversity

Story hook

Deep in the Anaimalai Hills of the Western Ghats, a frog the size of a thumbnail leaps from a flowering plant to a wet rock. It is Raorchestes manohari, named only in 2014 by a team led by S.D. Biju at the University of Delhi. It is one of forty-three new frog species described from a single 1,300 km mountain chain in the past two decades. The Western Ghats — a 160-million-year-old range running parallel to India's west coast — harbours 325 species of fish, 510 birds, 175 reptiles, 220 amphibians, and 6,000 flowering plants. Roughly half of these amphibians and a third of the reptiles are endemic — they exist nowhere else on Earth.

Now imagine the opposite. In the same window, between 2010 and 2023, India officially declared three species extinct: the Pink- headed Duck (Rhodonessa caryophyllacea, last confirmed 1949 — wait, the duck went extinct decades ago and was only retroactively declared so), the Indian Cheetah (1952), and the Lesser Florican — not yet extinct but the population has crashed below 500 birds. Globally, the IPBES 2019 report estimated 1 million species at risk of extinction within decades, at rates tens to hundreds of times higher than the natural background rate.

These two stories — discovery and disappearance — define the field of biodiversity in the early 21st century. UPSC has tested this topic almost every year of the last two decades because it sits at the intersection of every environmental theme: conservation biology, climate change, sustainable development, indigenous rights, international treaties, and India's own legal architecture.

This file gives you the conceptual scaffolding (three levels of biodiversity), India's biogeographic zones, the four global hotspots that lie partly in India, the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 schedules, the legal protection regime, recent threats, and the landmark international + domestic conservation initiatives.

Why this matters for UPSC

India is one of the 17 megadiverse countries identified by Conservation International + UNEP-WCMC. These 17 hold 70% of Earth's biodiversity on 10% of land area. India ranks 8th in this group by total species count and is the only country with all four parts of the Indomalayan realm represented (Himalayas, Indo-Burma, Sundaland edge, Western Ghats).

For UPSC, you need to be able to (a) define biodiversity at three levels, (b) name India's biogeographic zones, (c) list the 4 biodiversity hotspots with their boundaries, (d) read the Wildlife Protection Act schedule structure post-2022 amendment, (e) identify recent conservation programs (Project Tiger, Cheetah, etc.), (f) link biodiversity to climate change (mass extinction event, the "sixth extinction"), and (g) discuss the international architecture (CBD 1992, Cartagena Protocol 2000, Nagoya Protocol 2010, Kunming- Montreal GBF 2022).

Static facts (hotspot count, schedule structure) are Prelims gold. The case-study questions (e.g., "Critically examine the cheetah reintroduction program") are Mains GS-III staples.