Harish (Honnayya) S. Gaonkar (born 1946 in Karwar, Karnataka, India)[citation needed] is an Indian specialist on butterflies who contributed to the Zoological Museum at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and wrote a 1996 compilation of butterflies of Western Ghats, South India cataloguing 330 species.
The proposal was submitted by James Mallet, professor of biological diversity at University College London, concerning a major collaboration between developed and developing countries backed by the Natural History Museum, London, to provide an open, online, complete and up-to-date database of the about 80,000 names applied to about 17,500 butterfly species.
Gaonkar was described as one of the named NHM staff members, postdoctoral students and scientific associates "with leading skills in butterfly taxonomy" and identified as "representing a critical mass of professional expertise unmatched elsewhere".
He wrote that "the origins of giving common English names to organisms, particularly butterflies for tropical species started in India around the mid 19th century.
I think the first to get such a name was the Common Mormon (Papilio polytes), because it had three different females, a fact that could only have been observed in the field, and this they did in India.