India is one of only 17 “megadiverse” countries on Earth — a small club of nations that together hold the majority of the planet’s plant and animal species. It’s a remarkable natural inheritance. It’s also, increasingly, a fragile one: habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, and climate change are pushing more of India’s native species toward the edge each year, even as scientific understanding of exactly how many species are at risk remains incomplete.
That data gap is larger than most people realise. Globally, only about 7.2% of fauna and 6.33% of plant species have even been formally assessed by the IUCN for extinction risk. India launched a five-year National Red List Assessment Initiative in 2025 specifically to close part of that gap, aiming to evaluate roughly 11,000 species — about 7,000 plants and 4,000 animals — by 2030.
Identifying which species are at risk is only half the job, though. The other half is what happens after a species is flagged — and that’s where the country’s newest conservation tool comes in.
A rulebook for naming a species “threatened”
The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) has released a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for notifying “Threatened Species” under Section 38 of the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 — the law that gives the central government, working with state governments, the power to formally designate a species as threatened with extinction and put protective measures in place.
Until now, that process lacked a uniform, transparent method that every state could follow consistently. The new SOP changes that. It lays out a step-by-step framework — scientific assessment, stakeholder consultation, validation, formal notification, conservation planning, and ongoing monitoring — that State Biodiversity Boards and Union Territory Biodiversity Councils can use to build a scientifically defensible case for protecting a given species, before recommending it to the state government for notification.
Crucially, the SOP doesn’t rely on government scientists working in isolation. It explicitly calls for combining the best available scientific evidence and field assessments with traditional and local community knowledge — drawing in Biodiversity Management Committees, the Botanical Survey of India, the Zoological Survey of India, academic institutions, and independent subject experts. For a country where a great deal of ecological knowledge lives with the communities who’ve shared land with these species for generations, that’s a meaningful design choice, not just a procedural footnote.
Where things stand today
So far, India has notified 159 plant species and 173 animal species as “threatened” across 17 states and 3 union territories under Section 38. Once a species is notified, its collection becomes regulated or prohibited, and the law requires the government to put in place measures for its rehabilitation and conservation — turning a legal designation into an actual obligation to act.
Given that India’s fauna alone shows roughly 13.4% threatened and another 13.8% “data deficient” (meaning scientists simply don’t yet know enough to classify them), there’s likely a long list of additional candidates waiting for exactly this kind of structured assessment pathway. A consistent SOP means future notifications — whether triggered by the National Red List Initiative’s findings or by independent state-level research — won’t get stuck in inconsistent, ad hoc processes between states.
Why this matters beyond the paperwork
It’s tempting to read a “Standard Operating Procedure” announcement as bureaucratic housekeeping. But in conservation, process is often the bottleneck — not the absence of will or science, but the absence of a clear, scalable way to translate scientific findings into legal protection. A transparent SOP, applied consistently across India’s states, is the kind of unglamorous infrastructure that determines whether species at risk today actually get the legal shield they need before it’s too late, rather than years from now after further decline.
Source: Press Information Bureau, Government of India (PRID 2278271)