Effective conservation and management of biological diversity depends on our understanding of taxonomy. Taxonomy is the science of naming, describing, and classifying flora, fauna, and microorganisms. Taxonomists identify, describe, and classify species— including those that are new to science—on the basis of characteristics that include morphology, behaviour, genetics, ecology, and biochemistry. Systematics, on he other hand, is about the evolutionary inter-relationships of each and every named and described organism. Thus, taxonomy and systematics provide basic knowledge of biological diversity to underpin conservation, management, and implementation of national commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Unfortunately, inadequate taxonomic information hinders our ability to make informed decisions about conservation, sustainable use, and benefit sharing. India, a signatory to the CBD, is one among the 17 mega-diversity countries of the world, with four biodiversity hotspots. It has 136,000 species described till date, and has a unique assemblage of biodiversity. This rich biodiversity can be attributed to its varied climatic zones and geological features such as the Himalaya, the Western and Eastern Ghats combined with the Deccan Plateau, hot and cold deserts, mighty rivers such as the Ganga and Brahmaputra, with their flood plains, and a long coastline. The subcontinent’s diverse cultures and hundreds of ethnic communities are, in turn, intricately connected to this biodiversity and its conservation. However, the process of biodiversity documentation in India lags behind when compared to neighbouring countries such as Bhutan, China, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. As part of achieving the Aichi targets (20 new biodiversity targets for 2020) related to the CBD’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020, India needs to better document its biodiversity, improve the conservation status of endangered species, and conserve ecologically representative landscapes. Taxonomy and conservation go hand-inhand. Efforts to understand the consequences of environmental change and degradation will be incomplete if the components of the ecosystems are not identified or described. Hence, documenting and assessing the biodiversity of a region is the first step to devising conservation plans to achieve the goal of biodiversity conservation. Although biodiversity in India was well documented during the pre- and post-independence period, recent studies have described numerous new plants and animals in the last 15 years, though they are restricted to selected groups such as frogs, butterflies, orchids, and rhododendrons. New descriptions of species are either due to intensive exploratory efforts in the Himalayas, or due to monographic studies involving molecular biological approaches (e.g., in the case of amphibians). Cataloguing and documenting India’s biological diversity, from genes to ecosystems, and reconstructing the evolutionary history and phylogeography (i.e., the distribution of genetic lineages) of India’s biodiversity, are the primary objectives of the Systematic Biology Group at ATREE. Our group works on systematics of plants, insects, freshwater and terrestrial snails, and frogs. We draw upon this work to illustrate how systematic biology (i.e., the study of the diversification of living forms, and their evolutionary inter-relationships) underpins biodiversity conservation.