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India is now home to 891 Asiatic lions, an increase of 32% since 2020.
The government of Gujarat, the only state where the animal is found in the wild, announced this finding on May 21, after the sixteenth “Lion Population Estimation”, an exercise that it conducts every five years.
The latest data shows that as a result of the government’s conservation efforts, lions have spread beyond the core population in the state’s Gir National Park – today, they are found across 11 districts of Gujarat’s Saurashtra region, including forested areas outside the national park in Gir-Somnath, Junagadh, and Porbandar districts. Amreli recorded the highest population, of an estimated 339 lions.
But while the government and conservationists have touted the news as a major success, some experts have long suggested that it is also essential for the species to establish a second independent population of lions in an area that is not contiguous with Gir, as these other forests are. This would reduce the chances of the animal’s extinction in case of an epidemic.
“Any catastrophe, natural or human-mediated, could wipe out the hard-won conservation success over several decades if all surviving members of an endangered species are restricted to a single site,” said Ravi Chellam, a senior biologist who has worked with Asiatic lions and is the coordinator of the Biodiversity Collaborative.
He added: “The risks are numerous and include cyclones, floods, forest fires, disease outbreaks, political decisions, droughts, poaching, violence and wars. Such risks have impacted populations of endangered species negatively across the world.”
Cheetahs vs lions
Until the nineteenth century, lions were found in the present day states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.
But the animals were hunted widely, and by 1888, the only lions that survived were in Gir.
Lions remained restricted to this area for decades. In 1995, the World Wide Fund for Nature-India filed a petition in the Supreme Court, arguing that the government needed to find a second home for the Gir lions to ensure its long-term survival.
Such a plan had already been under consideration. The Indian government and the Wildlife Institute of India had conducted a workshop in 1993, during which three possible relocation sites had been identified: two in Rajasthan and one in Madhya Pradesh.
Of these, the institute identified Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park, which predominantly comprises grasslands, as an ideal lion habitat.
In the years that followed, the relocation plan took shape. To prepare for it, beginning in 1998, 24 villages inside Kuno were relocated, displacing over 1,500 families. But in 2004, the state of Gujarat declined to part with the lions, and instead proposed that it would relocate them within the state itself, as Scroll had previously reported.
From 2007 onwards, the state took up the work of lion conservation with greater focus, adopting what it termed “Asiatic Lion Landscape Approach” – this entailed widening the protected territory for the animal by notifying sanctuaries contiguous with Gir, such as Girnar, Pania and Mitiyali, an area it referred to as the Greater Gir.
Meanwhile, in 2012, the environment ministry announced that it was importing African cheetahs to introduce them to Kuno. In 2013, while hearing the World Wide Fund for Nature-India petition related to finding a second home for lions, the Supreme Court ordered a stay on the plan. In the same hearing, the court also ordered that lions be relocated to Kuno as the Wildlife Institute of India had recommended earlier.
It stated, “our approach should be eco-centric and not anthropocentric” and should serve “the best interest of the Asiatic lions”. It declared that protecting the lions was the “top priority” and that bringing the cheetahs in first would be “an illegal and clear violation of the statutory requirements provided under the Wildlife Protection Act”.
But subsequently, in 2020, the court lifted the stay, and allowed the cheetah reintroduction plan to proceed – the first of the animals arrived in Kuno in September 2022.
Chellam said it was “very unfortunate” that the 2013 order directing the relocation of lions is still to be implemented, more than 12 years after it was pronounced. “It is a sad reflection on the current state of the rule of law and conservation in India.”
The cost of a single home
Even as the dispute over relocating lions to Kuno played out, Gujarat focused on establishing other regions within the state as “satellite populations” for the animals.
The latest census suggests that the efforts were successful – it noted for the first time that populations in three such sites other than Gir had been established, including the Barda Wildlife Sanctuary, where the species was last recorded to have been found in 1879. “Therefore, the concept of a second home for the lions within the Gujarat state has been materialised, which will be helpful for the long-term conservation of the species,” the census report stated.
However, some experts argue that pride in this success must be tempered by the fact that these sites are connected through forest corridors, which would allow lions to move through them. “The whole point in translocating a few lions to establish a second free-ranging population of wild Asiatic lions is to ensure geographical isolation,” said Chellam.
The risk of disease is particularly acute, experts noted. In 2018, an outbreak of canine distemper virus killed 34 lions, which prompted the state to quarantine and vaccinate the lions at risk.
Gujarat’s limited carrying capacity
The latest census also indicates that there has been a massive expansion in the area used by lions – while 284 lions used around 6,600 sq km in 1990, almost 900 lions now use around 35,000 sq km.
But experts note that vast tracts of the land currently used fall outside protected areas. “The existing protected areas have exceeded the carrying capacity and spilled over,” said MK Ranjitsinh , a conservationist who drafted the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 and played a role in reintroducing cheetahs.
Indeed, the report shows that while 56% of the lion population is still within forested areas, the other half uses wastelands, agricultural lands, riverine areas, built-up areas and a category it terms areas “near human habitations”.
As more and more land is used by both lions and humans, interactions and conflicts have increased. In a 2024 paper, wildlife biologists found that conflicts with lions had increased steadily in five districts of Saurashtra over the past decade or so. Since 2012, it noted, approximately 13 new villages each year faced the problem of lions attacking livestock. Only about 10% of these attacks were in forested areas, while 90% of them were reported from human-dominated areas outside the protected area in Gir.
“Moving lions to a different state would have been ideal,” said Ranjitsinh. “But if that is not possible, then at least they should be given adequate protected areas to ensure that there is no conflict with people.”
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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