Beyond Gir: How In India, The Asiatic Lion Is No Longer Fighting for Survival But for Space

On a Friday morning in August, a farm owner in Dhokadva village in Gujarat’s Gir Somnath district noticed a foul smell coming from a well. At the bottom of the 30-foot-deep, water-filled well lay the carcass of a three- to five-year-old lion.

The lion had apparently torn through the net covering the well before falling in. Forest officials recovered the carcass and sent it for a post-mortem examination.

It was another reminder of the changing geography of the Asiatic lion’s recovery.

The lions are protected in Gir. But they no longer live only in Gir.

In May 2025, Gujarat’s 16th Lion Population Estimation recorded 891 Asiatic lions, up from 674 in 2020 — a 32 percent increase in five years.

But perhaps the more revealing number is where those lions were found.

Only 394 were recorded in Gir National Park, Gir Wildlife Sanctuary, Pania Wildlife Sanctuary and adjoining areas that form the core or source population.

The remaining 497 lions were spread across nine satellite populations outside the core landscape.

These included areas along the Bhavnagar coast, southwest Saurashtra and other human-dominated landscapes.

The 2025 estimation also documented three new satellite populations, including Barda Wildlife Sanctuary, Jetpur and adjoining areas, and the Babra-Jasdan region.

If lion numbers are rising while more than half of the estimated population is now living outside the core Gir landscape, what exactly does conservation success look like?

The question matters because, outside protected forests, a lion’s habitat can be a farm, grazing ground, village edge, road or even a coastal settlement.

The landscape is moving

Recent months have brought a series of incidents across the Greater Gir landscape.

In June, a 25-year-old restaurant worker from Uttarakhand was killed in a suspected lion attack near Kovaya village in Amreli district, reported Indian Express. Forest officials found parts of his body and his severed head near an approach road and began an operation to capture a pride of four lions moving through the area.

According to media reports, days later, another suspected lion attack was reported in the Mahuva area of neighbouring Bhavnagar district, where a man’s partially eaten body was recovered from bushes. Forest officials said the circumstances were still being investigated and that it was too early to conclusively attribute the death to a wild animal.

On 24 June, a five-year-old boy in Chaturi village in Amreli district was killed after a lioness attacked him while he was walking with his grandfather, per reports cited by India Today. It was reported as the third lion attack in Amreli district within a month.

The response in such cases is familiar: track the animal, identify the suspected lion, capture it and assess whether it poses a continuing risk.

That response is necessary when people are in danger. But what happens when the challenge is not one particular lion, but a growing population sharing an increasingly human-dominated landscape?

As wildlife biologist and conservation scientist Ravi Chellam puts it, the language used to describe these encounters can itself become misleading.

“Currently, lions are found outside the Gir area in revenue areas. The issue is not that lions have begun appearing where they were not expected. It is that the places where they are expected to live and the places where people live are overlapping.”

Start with the number

The figure of 891 is striking. But Chellam argues that the first step should be to examine the number rather than simply celebrate it.

The 2025 estimation counted 196 adult males, 330 adult females, 140 sub-adults and 225 cubs.

It was conducted through a large-scale exercise involving thousands of personnel and individual identification methods. A 2026 peer-reviewed study of the estimation described the methodology as involving 3,254 trained personnel, individual identification through body markings and duplication checks using direct observations and the SIMBA artificial-intelligence system.

Yet Chellam says the ecological meaning of the figure needs to be examined separately.

“Firstly, we need to understand the accuracy of the lion estimation report done by the Forest Department. We need to ask whether it has enough scientific merit or not. We tend to celebrate a rise in wildlife numbers, but the merit of that rise has to be judged from the ecological perspective.”

“Why and what the report adopted, the methodology — is the scientific approach correct? Because the land has constantly seen conflicts or even diseases in lions, so whether it is practical or not needs to be understood.”

These questions are important because a population does not exist independently of its landscape.

Rainfall affects water availability. Water affects vegetation. Vegetation affects herbivores. Herbivores affect carnivores.

“I am often mystified by wildlife numbers always rising, because that is not really ecologically feasible. It depends on the weather and the monsoon. If we are now seeing fairly long dry periods of six to nine months, that also means water shortages, which affect vegetation, and that affects herbivores, which in turn affects carnivore populations.”

“So it cannot always go north.”

For Chellam, the more important question is whether the landscape beneath that rising graph is keeping pace.

“Without having quality habitats and, most importantly, connected habitats, numbers are nothing.”

More lions, but where?

The 2025 estimate provides an important clue.

Of the 891 lions counted, 394 were in the core Gir landscape. The remaining 497 were distributed across nine satellite populations outside it.

That means more lions were recorded outside the core population area than inside it.

A rare and spine-chilling wildlife incident was witnessed in the Gir forest, the only home of Asiatic lions, leaving tourists stunned during a safari at Sasan Gir Nature Safari Park.

While tourists were observing lions from a safari jeep, a lion and a lioness suddenly launched a… pic.twitter.com/TmEx8m7Hnb

— Hate Detector 🔍 (@HateDetectors) May 12, 2026

In ecological terms, dispersal can indicate that a species is recovering its range. But dispersal also changes the conservation task.

A lion inside a protected forest is managed primarily through habitat protection, prey management, monitoring and anti-poaching measures.

A lion outside it may encounter an open well, highway, livestock, agricultural fields, industrial infrastructure or a village at night.

Government data also shows that mortality has not disappeared alongside population growth.

According to data presented in Parliament, 669 lions died between 2020 and 2024. Reported causes included old age, illness, injuries, cub mortality, falls into open wells, electrocution and accidents.

That is the paradox of a successful recovery: as a population grows and expands its range, the conservation challenge shifts from protecting a species from extinction to ensuring there is enough safe habitat for it to survive.

Chellam puts the problem bluntly

“We don’t always need a population census per se to tell you about the health of the forest. It just gives a good certificate, but what we need is field protection.”

And that protection, he says, has to extend beyond the boundaries drawn on maps.

“We have to call out ‘blasphemous’ things being done, like cutting short so many habitats, destroying connectivity…”

The disease question

There is another reason the geography of the lion population matters: disease.

In recent months, Gujarat’s lions have faced renewed concern over disease-related deaths.

Reports in June said at least 13 lions, including 10 cubs, had died in Gir Somnath and Amreli within around 10 days. Local sources attributed some deaths to babesiosis and raised concerns about canine distemper virus. The Forest Department disputed parts of that account and confirmed eight deaths as being linked to “seasonal illness”.

For an endangered species whose entire wild population is restricted to one broad landscape, a disease outbreak can have consequences beyond individual deaths.

“A disease outbreak in a wild and free-ranging population of an endangered species is always worrisome,” says Chellam.

The second home that never arrived

There is an older conservation question beneath the current one.

Should all wild Asiatic lions continue to live in Gujarat?

For years, conservation scientists have argued that maintaining the species in a single geographically concentrated population exposes it to systemic risks such as disease, extreme weather, natural disasters and other landscape-level shocks.

In 2013, the Supreme Court directed that Asiatic lions be reintroduced into Kuno in Madhya Pradesh, treating a second population as necessary for the species’ long-term survival. The court framed the issue through an “eco-centric” approach and the “species best interest standard”.

More than a decade later, India’s wild Asiatic lions remain restricted to Gujarat.

“No hope so far. Almost 13 years later, lions are only restricted to Gujarat,” says Chellam.

The irony is difficult to miss.

Chellam believes the consequences of that delay are becoming visible in Saurashtra.

“So naturally that has been flouted and now there is a local overabundance.”

That does not mean lions have suddenly become too numerous in absolute terms. It means the available landscape, in his assessment, is not expanding at the same pace as the population.

The Gir situation

“For Gir, yes, there’s nothing to do with corridors because lions can move through any place — human settlements, people’s balconies even. They are capable of moving through these human-dominated landscapes. So, in the case of Gir, we cannot look at corridors in the conventional sense of saying that animals need a particular forested passage to move from one protected area to another.”

“To any animal, boundaries are administrative marks. They will not understand it, of course. But Gir is only 1,500 sq km — so 800–900 lions are a lot for that. We have created these administrative boundaries and defined Gir as the space where the lions are supposed to remain, but the animals don’t recognise those boundaries. If the population increases beyond what that landscape can support, they will naturally move out in search of space and resources,” he adds.

Approx 2-3 month old lion cub was found dead in a farmer’s field in Gujarat’s Amreli after allegedly getting trapped in a field net. Preliminary findings point to suffocation after pressure on its throat. Forest officials have sent the body for postmortem.@NewIndianXpresspic.twitter.com/xbu7iEFQof

— Dilip Kshatriya (@Kshatriyadilip) September 8, 2026

The way these incidents are reported can also shape public perception, with encounters sometimes being described as “intentional attacks” before the circumstances and behaviour of the animal have been established.

“‘They strayed’ is the wrong word. It’s our fault. Are we drawing administrative lines and then saying the animals have strayed? The lion has not crossed some natural boundary. We have drawn that line and then decided that anything outside it is somewhere the lion should not be. If the animal is moving into other areas because there is pressure within its existing landscape, then we need to ask what we have done to the landscape rather than call it the animal’s mistake.”

Chellam estimates that the number of lions Gir can sustainably support is much lower than today’s total.

“Around 200–300 should be absolute max, approximately, scientifically.”

What does success look like now?

The figure of 891 is still a conservation achievement.

The Asiatic lion has survived when it could have disappeared from the wild altogether. Its population has grown, its range has expanded and new satellite populations have emerged.

But success at one stage of a species’ recovery can create the next conservation challenge.

A population that once needed protection from extinction now needs enough safe habitat to disperse through. A lion that once needed a forest boundary may now need a landscape plan that includes farms, villages, roads, coastlines and other human-dominated areas. A disease-control strategy aimed at individual animals may need to become population-wide surveillance.

And a census can tell us how many lions exist. It cannot, by itself, tell us whether the landscape can continue to support them.

“Can’t call these attacks”

As Chellam puts it, “the conservation challenge has moved on. It is no longer only about getting lions to survive. It is about making sure there is enough safe, connected landscape for a growing population to live in.”

Right now, almost 400 lions are outside Gir. Accidents have taken place, and there have also been instances of purposeful attacks. These interactions are likely to continue if pressure on the land grows.

“Can’t call these attacks.”

It is a useful correction to the way human-lion encounters are often framed. The lion does not know where Gir ends. It does not know which patch of land is protected, which is revenue land or which road marks a human boundary. It simply moves through the landscape available to it.

That leaves Gujarat with a very different conservation problem from the one it faced when the Asiatic lion was fighting for survival.

The question now is not just how many lions can we save? It is how much landscape are we prepared to share with them?

“We are sharing the landscape with wild animals, and then the landscape can’t just benefit us humans. It has to be helpful for the animals too.”

Sources:

‘Man mauled to death by lion after running into a pride in Gujarat’: By Express News Service, Published on 16 June 2026

‘PM Modi’s Leadership Roars Behind Project Lion’s Triumph, says Union Minister Shri Bhupender Yadav’: By Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change 

‘Second suspected lion attack in 48 hours; body found in Bhavnagar’: By The Times of India, Published on 18 Jun 2026