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India nature wonderland. S01e02.

India: Nature's Wonderland, BBC2 - TV review: Stunning footage but David Attenborough can rest easy 

India: Nature’s Wonderland (BBC2) may have opened with these words, but it was trying to highlight an alternative view of the country as one of the most biodiverse places on earth. A tag team of presenters – Liz Bonnin in the west, Freida Pinto in the northeast and Jon Gupta in the Himalayas – sought to demonstrate the immense scope of India’s landscape and its wildlife.
Unfortunately for the biodiversity angle, a number of the animals they looked at are critically endangered. The Gir forest is home to just 500 or so Asiatic lions (to be fair, nowhere else has any, even though they once ranged as far as the Mediterranean). The singing Hoolock gibbons of Assam number about 2,600 in total, and there aren’t quite that many Bengal tigers in all of India.
Conservation efforts, however, seem to have made real headway – the lion population, at its lowest point, was 12 – and the programme illustrated the extent to which Indians and animals have adapted to coexistence. The elephants of the Western Ghats still use their ancestral migration routes, having been granted the right of way through busy tea plantations. Obviously this is potentially dangerous, and in more built-up areas an elephant warning system is in place – basically, you get a text if someone spots elephants hanging out by the bus shelter.
There were, along the way, some spectacular sights: a hidden valley alive with wildflowers, 3,000m above sea level; centuries-old footbridges woven out of the living roots of fig trees; a great pied hornbill flying over a coffee plantation.
“This is a land that seems to have it all,” said Bonnin.