(As on February 2006)

Caves in Meghalaya Meghalaya is a natural paradise with innumerable caves the earliest man’s abode, sheltering hum dates back to the Paleolithic Age. Caves are very dark, damp and cold, inside, usually full of water during rainy season, sunlight or sunrays can hardly penetrated inside the cave. Earlier lighted torches were used for entering the caves. But later on a more powerful beam torchlight and electricity was used for smooth entering into the caves. Caves are the most unique and rare beauty that natures had endowed. Caves are mostly of stalagmites and stalactite formation of late caves had been the biggest attraction as an Adventure Sport, thanks to the Meghalaya Adventures Association, who took up the initiative to venture into caves, From then onwards caving became popular and famous drawing the attention of global cavers for speleologist. M.A.A. aimed at promoting tourism in the state thus brought Meghalaya caves in the International circle of expansive excavation holding records of the longest and deepest caves in India, as scaled and mapped by the speleologist experts. Caving is an adventure blend with speleologist and hydrology. For archaeologies caves are store houses. There is every possibility of caving becoming one of the most flourishing tourism industry in the State, provided that caving equipments should be well furnished like Flat Rubber Boat, Rubber outfits inclusive of gloves and boots, helmet with lights, steel ladder, ropes powerful torch lights etc. A provisional survey of the Fauna found inside the Meghalaya Cave system are Bats, Spiders, Beetles, Woodlice, Millipedes, Brown Crickets, Blind Cockroach, Blind Crickets, Fly, Snot-Gobbler, which are the common terrestrial species, common Aquatic species found are shrimps, crabs and fishes. It seems Meghalaya possesses around 1000 caves more or less where the number of caves identified and registered in the cave registry stands at 788 caves as on 8th March, 2002, out of which 478 have been explored and 258 mapped (42 partly) yielding a total cave region in the world, making Meghalaya shines globally in the International Caving Map with some outstanding sub-continents longest and deepest caves, besides also having the longest sandstone cave.