Ichthyofaunal diversity of India-challenges ahead for a Mega Biodiversity Country In: ICAR Sponsored Winter School on Recent Advances in Fishery Biology Techniques for Biodiversity Evaluation and Conservation, 1-21 December 2018, Kochi.

Indian fish taxonomy has a long history, which started with Kautilya’s Arthasastra describing fish as a source for consumption as early as 300 B.C and the epic on the second pillar of Emperor Ashoka describing the prohibition of consumption of fish during a certain lunar period, which can be interpreted as a conservation point of view. Modern scientific studies on Indian fishes could be traced to the initial works done by Linnaeus in 1758. M.E. Bloch is one of the pioneers in the field of fish taxonomy along with the naturalists, zoologists and botanists who laid the foundation for fisheries research in India such as Bloch and Schneider (1795-1801) and Lacepede (1798-1803). Russell worked on 200 fishes off Vizagapatanam during 1803. Hamilton (1822) described 71 estuarine fishes of India in his work An Account of Fishes Found in the River Ganges and Its Branches. The mid 1800s contributed much in the history of Indian fish taxonomy since the time of the expeditions was going through. Cuvier and Valenciennes work on taxonomy is indispensable to India and described 70 nominal species off Puducherry. Francis Day in the epoch-making book “The Fishes of India: Being a Natural History of the Fishes Known to Inhabit the Seas and Fresh Waters of India, Burma, and Ceylon and another book Fauna of British India Series in two volumes describing 1,418 species are the two most indispensable works on Indian fish taxonomy to date