The diversity of a biogeographical subregion is maintained through dispersal and diversification. Many members of the vertebrate fauna of the Indian subcontinent were derived through dispersal (Karanth, 2021). However, their origins are extremely diverse, owing to the strategic position of the subcontinent (Mani, 1974). Furthermore, lineages adapted to a range of habitats and terrains may have successfully colonized the subcontinent because of its geographical and climatic heterogeneity. The climate also fluctuated over time, which allowed for dispersal of both wet-adapted and dry-adapted groups into and out of India (Klaus et al., 2016, Sil et al., 2019). The aforementioned climatic fluctuations combined with the relative isolation of the subcontinent also facilitated in situ diversifications (Datta Roy et al., 2012, 2014, Karanth, 2015; Agarwal & Karanth, 2015; Agarwal & Ramakrishnan, 2017; Deepak & Karanth, 2018; Lajmi & Karanth, 2020). However, most of these studies focused on terrestrial vertebrates. The ecology, physiology and dispersal ability of freshwater organisms are vastly different from those of terrestrial organisms and as a result they respond differently to similar climatic changes or geographical features (Lundberg et al., 1998; Kappes et al., 2014; Apolinário-Silva et al., 2021; Rankin et al., 2021; Sudasinghe et al., 2021). Hence, it is imperative to investigate how the diversity of freshwater organisms is maintained in a region to fully understand the faunal evolutionary history of that region. Freshwater snails are poor active dispersers but they exhibit various modes of passive dispersal (Kappes & Haase, 2012; Van Leeuwen et al., 2013). They exhibit strong evolutionary responses to geomorphological and climatic changes. Hence, these taxa could give us unique insight into how the physical features of the Indian subcontinent affect the distribution, diversification and phylogeography in freshwater ecosystems. Indoplanorbis exustus (Deshayes, 1834) is an air-breathing freshwater snail belonging to the family Bulinidae and taxonomic group Heterobranchia. Indoplanorbis is a monotypic genus distributed across tropical Asia from Sundaland, throughout mainland Southeast Asia, parts of China, over the entire Indian subcontinent and to Oman in the west (Albrecht et al., 2019).