The Eastern Ghats are among the oldest exposed mountain systems on the planet. Their geological substrate — predominantly khondalite, charnockite, and granite of Archaean to Proterozoic age — records crustal growth processes spanning 3.0 to 0.5 billion years, with tectonic domains that participated in the assembly and breakup of supercontinents Columbia and Rodinia (Bose et al. 2011; Dasgupta et al. 2013). The Eastern Ghats Belt preserves deep crustal sections that are considered analogous to deeply eroded Himalayan-type settings (Dobmeier & Raith 2003), yet unlike the Himalayas and the Western Ghats, they have received a fraction of the scientific and policy attention.

This is a discontinuous chain of hills extending approximately 1,750 km from the Mahanadi River in Odisha to the Vaigai in Tamil Nadu, covering roughly 75,000 km² across five states — Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu (Jayakumar et al. 2009; Behera et al. 2024). The average elevation is around 600 m, but the range spans sea level to 1,680 m at Arma Konda. This span encompasses tropical dry deciduous forest, tropical dry evergreen forest, scrub, thorn woodland, and patches of semi-evergreen and moist deciduous forest — a vegetational heterogeneity that reflects the complex interplay of rainfall, elevation, substrate, and palaeohistory across the Deccan (Meher-Homji 1977; Champion & Seth 1968; Ratnam et al. 2016). The Eastern Ghats harbour more than 3,200 species of flowering plants, whose diversity reflects geographical, climatic, and altitudinal variation across a phytogeographic region characterised by the co-existence of plant lineages with Himalayan, northeast Indian, and Western Ghats affinities (Kadavul & Parthasarathy 1999; Sivaraj et al. 2020; Warrier et al. 2020). Tropical dry evergreen forests, in particular, are largely restricted to the Eastern Ghats of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, making them a vegetation type of global rarity.

The faunal and floral links of the Deccan Peninsula to the ancient southern supercontinent Gondwanaland are evident in the presence of relict lineages with biological affinities to Africa, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka. The peninsula's biogeographic history — its northward drift, collision with Laurasia, and subsequent climatic oscillations — has produced patterns of endemism that remain poorly resolved, particularly in the dry zones east of the Western Ghats (Karanth 2006; Vijayakumar et al. 2016; Bossuyt et al. 2004). New species continue to be described from the Eastern Ghats across taxa: recent herpetofaunal inventories of the Central Eastern Ghats recorded 105 species of amphibians and reptiles, including new range extensions and rare species, from a single 300-day survey effort (Ganesh et al. 2021). Five new microendemic Cnemaspis species were described from the Shevaroy massif alone (Agarwal et al. 2022). Many taxa remain known only from their type localities. Significant squamate diversity — gekkonids, scincids, colubrids — includes several taxa endemic or largely restricted to the scrub forests of peninsular India, and mesic forests in these ranges remain poorly explored, likely concealing undescribed species (Ganesh & Chandramouli 2018).

And yet, the Eastern Ghats have no equivalent of the Western Ghats' biodiversity hotspot designation. They receive no comparable institutional investment, no dedicated research infrastructure, and no sustained funding pipeline. The consequences are predictable. Mining, industrialisation, and habitat clearance proceed without the friction of recognition. Bauxite, manganese, and iron ore extraction are among the fastest-growing threats (Forest Survey of India; Zoological Survey of India). Long-term land use studies show that between 1920 and 2015, the Eastern Ghats experienced extensive forest loss to agricultural expansion, infrastructure development, and mining, with consequences for landscape connectivity (Ramachandran et al. 2018). Invasive species — Lantana camara, Prosopis juliflora — outcompete native flora across degraded tracts. The protected area network is thin and unevenly distributed; its effectiveness is routinely questioned (Reddy & Satheesh 1997). The discontinuous nature of the hill ranges, separated by major river valleys and anthropogenic landscapes, provides a unique natural system for investigating species distributions, endemism, population genetics, and evolutionary diversification — but only if someone actually does the work (Bossuyt et al. 2004).

The disparity is not one of ecological value. It is one of knowledge. The Western Ghats have been studied intensively for over a century; the Eastern Ghats have not. Soil chemistry, geomorphology, phytochemistry, population dynamics of plant species, and the spatial ecology of most vertebrate and invertebrate taxa remain unaddressed in any systematic way (Sudhakar Reddy et al. 2008; Dutta & Mohapatra 2017; Dash & Mohapatra 2025). There is no comprehensive molecular barcode library for Eastern Ghats flora. The trophic ecology of even medically important snake species across peninsular India has never been studied using modern methods. Conservation in the Eastern Ghats, to the extent it exists, operates largely without an understanding of the organisms it aims to protect — their evolutionary histories, ecological specialisations, physiological limits, or population structure.