The Zoological Survey of India (ZSI), the national body for faunal research under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, has completed the first detailed Catalogue of Lepidoptera in India. The work, built over more than 12 years of field surveys and museum studies, documents 13,703 species of butterflies and moths found in the country. With this, India has its first authoritative and centrally verified reference on one of the most important groups of insects in the world.
A First-of-Its-Kind National Record
The catalogue is a scientific inventory that lists every known butterfly and moth species recorded in India, standardises their scientific names, updates their classification and resolves decades of taxonomic confusion. For more than a century, descriptions of Indian moths and butterflies lay scattered across colonial-era monographs, foreign museum collections and journals in several languages. The same species was often described more than once under different names, creating what scientists call synonymy, which made reliable identification difficult.
The project stitched these scattered records into a single verified checklist. It involved extensive field surveys across India, examination of museum specimens in the National Zoological Collections and careful verification of published scientific literature over more than a decade.
The complete work runs into 22 volumes, with each volume covering a different group within the order. The final volume, which documents the remaining 1,689 species distributed across 506 genera and 65 families, was authored by ZSI taxonomists Rahul Joshi and Navneet Singh and published in Zootaxa, a leading international peer-reviewed journal of animal taxonomy based in New Zealand. That concluding volume also resolved several long-standing taxonomic ambiguities, completing what ZSI calls the country’s first authoritative and centralised reference on the group.
What the Catalogue Contains
Lepidoptera is the insect order that includes butterflies and moths. The name comes from the Greek words lepis, meaning scale, and pteron, meaning wing, a reference to the tiny overlapping scales that cover their wings. It is the second largest order of insects in the world, after beetles (Coleoptera), with roughly 180,000 described species globally.
Of the 13,703 species recorded in India, 1,417 are butterflies and 12,286 are moths. Moths, which are mostly active at night, account for the overwhelming majority of the country’s Lepidoptera. The species are distributed across ecosystems ranging from the Himalayas and the Western Ghats to the tropical rainforests of the northeast and the island habitats of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago.
| Taxonomic Level | Number in India |
|---|---|
| Species | 13,703 |
| Genera | 3,705 |
| Subfamilies | 240 |
| Families | 102 |
| Superfamilies | 31 |
Together, these species represent about 8.25 per cent of the world’s known butterfly and moth diversity, a share that underscores India’s standing as one of the planet’s megadiverse nations.
The Geometroidea Spotlight
A major component of the project is a dedicated catalogue of Geometroidea, a superfamily of moths that includes several important nocturnal pollinators. These moths are commonly known as geometer or inchworm moths because their caterpillars, which lack the middle pairs of legs, move by arching their bodies in a looping, measuring gait. They are found across forests, grasslands and gardens, and many are significant agricultural and forestry pests.
The catalogue identifies 2,205 species of Geometroidea in India, spread across 479 genera, 13 subfamilies and four families. This accounts for roughly 8.8 per cent of the world’s known diversity in the superfamily.
| Family | Number of Species in India |
|---|---|
| Geometridae | 2,100 |
| Uraniidae | 95 |
| Epicopeiidae | 9 |
| Pseudobistonidae | 1 |
Within the Geometridae family, the most species-rich subfamilies are Ennominae with 895 species, Larentiinae with 565 species and Geometrinae with 309 species. Notably, the family Sematuridae is absent from India, a distributional gap the catalogue records for the first time in a consolidated manner.
Why Butterflies and Moths Matter
Butterflies and moths are far more than colourful visitors to gardens. As adults, they are important pollinators. While butterflies work mostly in daylight, moths carry out the crucial task of nocturnal pollination, fertilising flowers that bloom after sunset, many of which no other insect visits. Their caterpillars are among the most abundant herbivores, converting plant matter into food for the animals higher up the chain.
They also serve as a vital food source for birds, bats, reptiles, amphibians and predatory insects, and some act as detritivores that help break down dead plant material. Because butterflies and moths are highly sensitive to temperature, habitat and vegetation changes, and have short life cycles, they are widely used as indicator species, signals of the overall health of an ecosystem and early warnings of climate shifts.
The economic links are direct. Many moth larvae are pests of crops, orchards and forests, so an accurate list of species is essential for pest management and plant protection. On the positive side, the order includes Bombyx mori, the domesticated silkworm moth, which underpins India’s substantial sericulture industry. This is why a verified taxonomic record is not an academic luxury; it is a practical tool for agriculture, forestry and conservation.
The Agency Behind the Effort
The Zoological Survey of India is the country’s apex organisation for the survey, exploration and taxonomic study of animal life. It was established on 1 July 1916, evolving from the zoological section of the Indian Museum in Calcutta, and is headquartered in Kolkata. It functions under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and operates 16 regional centres spread across India’s major biogeographic zones.
ZSI is the designated repository of the National Zoological Collections, a reference collection of millions of identified specimens, and is recognised under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. Its other well-known outputs include the Red Data Book of Indian Animals, the Fauna of India series and the annual Animal Discoveries report, which tracks new species found in the country each year. The current director, Dr Dhriti Banerjee, is the first woman to head the institution.
The two taxonomists who authored the final volume, Rahul Joshi and Navneet Singh, work at the ZSI’s High Altitude Regional Centre in Solan, Himachal Pradesh, and have led the Lepidoptera cataloguing programme. The results of the entire series are also accessible through the online Catalogue of Indian Lepidoptera portal.
India’s Place in Global Biodiversity
India is recognised as one of the 17 megadiverse countries of the world, a list first drawn up by Conservation International in 1998. Despite covering only about 2.4 per cent of the Earth’s land area, India hosts around 8 per cent of all recorded species on the planet. The country also holds four of the world’s 36 biodiversity hotspots: the Himalayas, the Indo-Burma region, the Western Ghats-Sri Lanka region and Sundaland, the last reaching into India through the Nicobar Islands.
ZSI’s records put India’s documented fauna at more than 105,000 species and subspecies, roughly 5.3 per cent of the world’s recorded animal diversity. Even so, a large part of the country’s invertebrate life remains poorly documented, which is why the completion of a full inventory for an entire insect order is significant. The 13,703 species of Lepidoptera represent one of the largest and most complete faunal baselines India now possesses for any major group.
Significance and the Way Forward
The practical value of a national catalogue lies in the baseline it creates. Conservationists cannot say a species is declining, that a region has lost diversity, or that a population is responding to climate change without an agreed record of what existed and under which name. With butterflies and moths acting as sensitive indicators of environmental stress, this inventory gives scientists and policymakers a yardstick against which future gains and losses can be measured.
The catalogue is expected to become the primary national reference for biodiversity assessment, ecological monitoring, climate change studies and conservation planning. It will also strengthen India’s reporting under global environmental commitments, including the Convention on Biological Diversity, and support the growing effort to map the country’s insect fauna, a field that still throws up new species every year, such as the record 709 new animal species India documented in 2025.
Taxonomy remains the foundation on which all biodiversity science rests. By settling the scientific names and identities of India’s butterflies and moths, this 22-volume work gives each of the country’s 13,703 species a clear legal and scientific identity, and provides the scientific community a reliable starting point for the discoveries that are certain to follow.
Key Takeaways
- The Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) has completed the first comprehensive Catalogue of Lepidoptera in India, documenting 13,703 species in 22 volumes.
- Of the total, 1,417 species are butterflies and 12,286 are moths, covering 3,705 genera, 240 subfamilies, 102 families and 31 superfamilies, about 8.25 per cent of the world’s known Lepidoptera diversity.
- The dedicated catalogue of the moth superfamily Geometroidea records 2,205 species, led by the family Geometridae with 2,100 species, about 8.8 per cent of global diversity in the superfamily.
- The final volume, documenting the remaining 1,689 species, was authored by ZSI taxonomists Rahul Joshi and Navneet Singh and published in the international journal Zootaxa.
- ZSI, established on 1 July 1916, is headquartered in Kolkata, functions under the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and is the designated repository of the National Zoological Collections under the Biological Diversity Act, 2002.
- Lepidoptera, the insect order of butterflies and moths, is the second largest insect order after beetles (Coleoptera) and includes Bombyx mori, the commercial silkworm.
