I found it useful most of the time but was frequently dissatisfied.

Most of the drawings are pretty good, but some are clearly taken from skins and don't portray the birds in their normal/natural positions. The leafbirds are a case in point - the colours and patterns are correct, but the birds don't really look like that when seen in a tree because of their posture.

Information on vocalisation is sporadic at best and frequently non-existent. Anyone who has watched birds in a forest setting, almost certainly the most exciting birding in this part of India, will know how useful a good description of a call/song can be.

There are no distribution maps. This is frustrating when you've spent 15 minutes trying to determine if the bird you're looking at is species a or species b, only to learn that species a does not occur within 500 miles.

Some birds are shown in flight only, e.g. the gulls. The gulls page actually looks a mess and it can be hard to determine which drawing relates to which bird. At least half the gulls we saw were at rest, so flight pictures were of limited use.

The 'status' recording is unusual. Birds are described as cr, nr, v, cw, nw, cp, np etc. where c=common, n=non-common, r=resident, v=vagrant, p=passage and w=winter. This gives very little info on the relative abundance of species and nr seems to cover birds that you might see once a day (e.g. Indian Robin) and birds that you might only see once in a lifetime (e.g. Sri Lankan Frogmouth).

I'd rather have the book than not, but it doesn't compare favourably against the well known European field guides.