Endemic species of India

Story hook

Stand on the cliff edge at Eravikulam National Park in Kerala in January and you can watch an animal that exists on about 400 kilometres of one mountain chain and nowhere else on the planet. The Nilgiri Tahr — stocky, saddle-backed, hooved like a goat and built like a mountaineer — grazes the cropped grass of the shola-grassland mosaic above 1,200 metres. There are roughly 3,000 of them in the world; the first synchronised Tamil Nadu-Kerala survey, in April 2024, counted 1,031 across its surveyed blocks, with Eravikulam holding the single largest herd. If the Western Ghats above the tree-line fail, the species does not retreat somewhere else. There is no somewhere else.

Now go 2,000 km north-east, to Gahirmatha in Odisha, where in a good year several lakh Olive Ridley turtles come ashore in a single week. It is the largest known arribada on Earth, and India protects it with a Coast Guard operation. But the same turtle nests at Ostional in Costa Rica and La Escobilla in Mexico, and swims the tropical Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. India hosts a globally important event. India does not host a globally restricted species.

That gap — between where a spectacle happens and where a species exists — is the whole subject of this file, and it is exactly where UPSC sets its trap. The unit's own list contains the trap twice over: five genuine endemics, one bird that is near-endemic because we shrank its range, and one turtle that is not endemic at all.

Why this matters for UPSC

Endemism sits in GS-III (Conservation, Biodiversity) and, through the biogeography of the Western Ghats and the islands, in GS-I (Physical Geography). Prelims tests it almost every year, but never as a definition — it comes as a "which of the following is/are found only in India" set or a matching-pairs item where one plausible name is native rather than endemic. Mains and the interview board use it differently: as the reason a small-range species has no margin for error, which is a policy argument, not a fact list.