The Western Ghats of India, along with Sri Lanka, is a global biodiversity hotspot (Myers et al. 2000) and has a high diversity of amphibians (Aravind and Gururaja 2012). In the last two decades, over 100 new species of frogs have been described from this region (Frost 2014). However descriptions of their larval counterparts are few. Tadpoles are an important stage in the amphibian life history and detailed studies of tadpoles can be useful in understanding phylogeny (Haas 2003), natural history (Thomas et al. 2005) and evolution (Roelants et al. 2011). Nyctibatrachidae represents one of the ancient frog families (Late Cretaceous in origin) in the Western Ghats with the genus Nyctibatrachus endemic to the Western Ghats and Lankanectes endemic to Sri Lanka (Bocxlaer et al. 2012). The genus Nyctibatrachus was discovered by Boulenger in 1882 and recently Biju et al. (2011) revised its taxonomy. At present there are 28 species in Nyctibatrachus (Gururaja et al. 2014). They are predominantly stream dwelling and found in torrent streams or in the leaf litter on the forest floor. The adults are brownish dorsally and are distinguished by rhomboid pupil, glandular wrinkled skin, notched tongue, subocular gland and pointed vomerine teeth (Biju et al. 2011).Tadpoles of the Nyctibatrachus genus are poorly studied with morphological descriptions available only for four species: N. pygmaeus (Annandale 1918, 1919); N. sanctipalustris (Rao 1923); N. humayuni (Bhaduri and Kripalani 1955); and N. major (Pillai 1978). With the recent taxonomic revision of the Nyctibatrachus genus and due to lack of molecular support, identities of these our species require validation. Molecular techniques using gene arkers like 16S rRNA have been used for tadpole identification (Grosjean et al. 2005). In this paper we provide, for the first time, descriptions of tadpoles of three species of Nyctibatrachus (N. kempholeyensis, N. jog and N. kumbara) from the central Western Ghats using morphology and molecular techniques. We discuss the taxonomic gaps in the previous studies of Nyctibatrachus tadpoles and the natural history of the three species, and highlight the use of the 16S rRNA gene marker in tadpole identification from biodiversity rich regions like the Western Ghats.