Habenaria Willdenow (1805: 544) is a large genus represented by approximately 848 species making it by far the largest in subfamily Orchidoideae (Cribb 2001, Kurzweil 2009, Govaerts et al. 2014, Batista et al. 2011), with centres of diversity in Brazil, southern and central Africa, and East Asia (Kurzweil & Weber 1992). In India, it is represented by 72 species, of which 36 are endemic (Misra 2007). About 45 species of Habenaria are known to occur in the Western Ghats of India, of which 21 species are endemic (Jalal & Jayanthi 2012). In Kerala, 26 species were reported so far with 17 endemic (Sasidharan 2013).