India Geography, Climate & Nature

India spans an enormous range of terrain, from the Himalayas along its northern border down through the fertile Indo-Gangetic Plain that supports much of the country's population, to the Deccan Plateau covering most of the peninsula's interior — a plateau of some 422,000 square kilometres with an average elevation of about 600 metres, bounded on either side by the Eastern and Western Ghats, which separate it from the coastal plains. The Western Ghats, down the western edge, is a biodiversity hotspot holding nearly 30 per cent of all the plant and animal species found in India, most of them endemic to the range, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2012.

The Thar Desert stretches across Rajasthan, while the country's long coastlines meet at the tropical southern tip near Kanyakumari.

Ladakh, in the far north, sits within the Himalayas at extreme altitude, more geologically similar to Tibet than the rest of India, while the northeastern states are dominated by dense hills and rainforest bordering Myanmar, Bangladesh, and China.

Most of India follows a three-season pattern -- a hot summer (March-June), a monsoon season (June-September) bringing the bulk of the year's rainfall, and a cooler, drier winter (October-February) that's generally the most comfortable time to travel.

Climate varies enormously by region -- Rajasthan's desert sees scorching summers, the Himalayan hill stations stay cool year-round, and Kerala's tropical coast stays warm and humid with a heavier monsoon.

Ladakh's high-altitude desert climate is starkly different again -- very low rainfall and brutally cold winters that cut the region off for months.

India holds an unusual share of the planet's large mammals for a country of its population density, and one of the world's biodiversity hotspots runs down its western edge. The reason is the same range of terrain that makes it hard to travel: Himalayan alpine and trans-Himalayan cold desert in the north, the Indo-Gangetic floodplain across the middle, the Deccan's dry deciduous forest, the Thar Desert, the mangroves of the Sundarbans and the wet evergreen forest of the Western Ghats.

The Western Ghats, running down the western edge of the peninsula, is the internationally significant one. It is a biodiversity hotspot holding nearly 30 per cent of all the plant and animal species found in India, most of them endemic to the range, with at least 325 globally threatened species; later surveys recorded 7,402 species of flowering plants there, of which 5,588 are indigenous. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012.

The northern extreme is the other distinct world. Ladakh sits at extreme altitude within the Himalaya and is geologically and biologically closer to Tibet than to the rest of India — a cold desert with very low rainfall, cut off by winter for months. The north-eastern states, by contrast, are dense hills and rainforest bordering Myanmar, Bangladesh and China, and hold species found nowhere else in the country.

India's conservation record is genuinely unusual among densely populated countries, and it is deliberate rather than accidental: Project Tiger, launched in 1973, had grown to 58 designated tiger reserves by March 2025. What a visitor sees in an Indian national park is the product of a fifty-year state programme.

The tiger is the reason most wildlife visitors come, and the numbers explain why. India's tiger population had fallen to 1,827 animals by the early 1970s from an estimated 40,000 at the end of the 19th century. Project Tiger was launched on 1 April 1973; as of 2022 there were 3,682 wild tigers in India, almost 75 per cent of the world's entire wild tiger population, across what had become 58 tiger reserves by March 2025. Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan's Ranthambore and the central Indian parks are where sightings are realistic.

The Asiatic lion exists in one place on earth and that place is Gujarat. Its range has been restricted to Gir National Park and the surrounding areas since the turn of the 20th century. The population numbered only 411 in 2010, was estimated at 523 in 2015, 650 in 2017 and 674 by 2023 — and since the mid-1990s about a third have lived outside the protected area, which has increased conflict with local residents. It is a recovery and a management problem at the same time.

The greater one-horned rhinoceros is listed as Vulnerable, with a population fragmented and restricted to less than 20,000 square kilometres. The global population was estimated at 1,870 to 1,895 animals in the early 1990s and has risen since through government conservation measures. Habitat destruction had reduced its range by the 19th century to the Terai grasslands of southern Nepal and northern India; Kaziranga in Assam is where it is seen.

Practically: India is one of the few countries where large-mammal viewing is a genuine reason to plan a trip, and it works on the same rule as everything else here — pick one park and one season. The dry months before the monsoon concentrate animals at water; the monsoon closes many parks entirely.