Fauna of India

India has some of the world's most biodiverse regions. The political boundaries of India encompass a wide range of ecozones—desert, high mountains, highlands, tropical and temperate forests, swamplands, plains, grasslands, areas surrounding rivers, as well as island archipelago. It hosts 4 biodiversity hotspots:the Himalayas, the Western Ghats, the Indo-Burma region and the Sundaland (Includes Nicobar group of Islands).

Quotes

 * India has more animal species than any other region of equal area in the world.
 * India’s fauna is the richest in the world: Robert Wolff, in the introduction to his book, “Animals of Asia”. Quoted in [This article is a major extract from the article "Sita Ram Goel, memories and ideas" by S. Talageri, written for the Sita Ram Goel Commemoration Volume, entitled "India's Only Communalist", edited by Koenraad Elst, published in 2005.


 * “Then, the presence of zebu genes and representations in Asia and Europe seem to be a promising ground of research, and certainly a confirmation that there was an important movement from South Asia to the West. It is difficult to think that this movement was only of cattle without herders, particularly where we find strong archaeological and historical signs of a common culture. (…) Actually, scholars have always thought of Indo-Europeans as the people of the horse and searched for horses in order to find Indo-Europeans. But they were also, and I would say more, the people of the cow”.
 * Indologist Giacomo Benedetti (2012), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.


 * The Biblical desacrilization of nature and the instrumentalization of other creatures in the service of mankind are alleged to be the doctrinal underpinnings of the massive destruction of wildlife and species diversity in the last two centuries… Stone Age peoples… have exterminated many species… Remark the contrast with India, where in spite of the immensely higher and denser population, no species mentioned in the Vedas had died out in the intervening millenia.
 * Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". p 550 ff.