India is the seventh largest country in the world and Asia’s second largest nation, with an area of 3,287,263 km2. The Indian mainland stretches from  8.o4’ to 37o 6’N latitude and  from 68o7’ to 97o 25’ E longitude.  It has a land frontier of about 15,200 km and a coastline of 7,516 km. This massive country with varied terrain, topography, landuse, geographic and climatic factors can be divided into ten recognizable biogeographic zones (Rodgers et al.,2000) (Fig. 1).  These zones encompass a variety of ecosystems: mountains, plateaus, rivers, forests, wetlands, lakes, mangroves, coral reefs, coasts and islands.  

Major Threats to Indian Biodiversity 

India has the second highest population density among the Asian countries.  It has about 16% of the total world’s population concentrated in slightly more than 2% of the world’s land area, a population which is growing annually at a rate of 2.3% (Kothari et al., 1989).  About a third of this population subsists below the poverty line.  Traditional and substantial dependence on the biodiversity resources for fodder, fuel wood, timber and minor forest produce has been an accepted way of life of the rural population that accounts for nearly 74% of India’s population.  With the radical demographic changes, the land to man ratio and forest to man ratio has rapidly declined.  From about 20 ha in 1951, the per capita forest area had been reduced to 0.11 ha  in 1981 (Lal, 1989) with further trends of reductions in subsequent years.  The lifestyles and the biomass resource needs having remained unchanged, the remnant forests have come under relentless pressures of encroachment for cultivation, and unsustainable resource extraction rendering the very resource base, unproductive and depleted of its biodiversity.  Coupled with these incongruities and aberrations in landuse, the unsound development strategies have led to increasing threats to biodiversity resources by way of illegal encroachment of 0.07 million ha of forest, cultivation of 4.37 million ha and diversion of forest for river valley projects (0.52 million ha), industries and townships (0.14 million ha), transmission lines and roads (0.06 million ha) and an additional 1.5 million ha for miscellaneous purposes (TERI, 1999).   

The unabated pace of development of hydraulic structures to harness hydropower driven by necessity to meet the growing requirements of water for inputs to irrigation, domestic use and industrial purposes has led to the construction of over 4000 dams in India.  The creation of valley bottom reservoirs in wilderness areas has brought the destruction of some of the finest forests and biodiversity-rich unique ecosystems.  The biodiversity losses due to deforestation for hydropower and mining projects are perhaps the greatest threats to biodiversity in India. The other important factors that have contributed to staggering loss of biodiversity are pollution of rivers, destruction of mangroves and fragile mountain systems, loss of wetlands due to land reclamation, poaching and hunting.  Apart from the primary loss of biodiversity due to development, there are numerous other problems contributing to the loss and endangered status of several floral and faunal species.  These include habitat losses and fragmentation leading to the formation of isolated scattered populations becoming increasingly vulnerable to inbreeding depressions, high infant mortality, susceptibility to environmental stochasticity and in the long run, possible extinction. According to the Red list of Threatened Plants (IUCN, 1997), 19 species are already extinct and 1236 species are threatened.  Of these, threatened 41 taxa are possibly extinct in the wild, 152 are endangered, 102 are vulnerable, 251 are rare, and 690 are indeterminate.  Nearly 23 animal species, including the Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), are known to have become extinct (Table 1.2) and many more are possibly on the verge of extinction (WCMC, 1992 and Khoshoo, 1996).