Strain AK12(T), an orange pigmented Gram-negative, rod shaped, non-motile bacterium, was isolated from a mud sample collected from a brackish water pond at Rampur of West Bengal, India. The strain was positive for oxidase, catalase and phosphatase. The predominant fatty acids were iso-C(15:0) (42.7%), iso-C(17:0) 3OH (13.2%), C(16:1ω7c)/C(16:1ω6c) (summed feature 3) (8.0%), iso-C(17:1) I/anteiso-C(17:1) B (summed feature 4) (6.1%) and iso-C(17:1ω9c)/C(16:0) 10-methyl (summed feature 9) (9.4%). Strain AK12(T) contained MK-7 as the major respiratory quinone and phosphatidylethanolamine, one unidentified aminophospholipid and six unidentified lipids as the polar lipids. The G + C content of DNA of the strain AK12(T) was 46.2 mol%. The 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis indicated that strain AK12(T) was member of the genus Echinicola and closely related to Echinicola vietnamensis, Echinicola pacifica and Echinicola jeungdonensis with pair-wise sequence similarity of 96.8, 96.3 and 96.0% respectively. Phylogenetic analyses indicated that the strain AK12(T) clustered with E. vietnamensis and together with E. pacifica and E. jeungdonensis with a phylogenetic distance of 5.1, 6.3 and 6.6% (94.9, 93.7 and 93.4% similarity) respectively. Based on data from the current polyphasic study, strain AK12(T) is proposed as a novel species of the genus Echinicola, for which the name Echinicola shivajiensis sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain of E. shivajiensis is AK12(T) (= MTCC 11083(T) = JCM 17847(T)).