The Asiatic lion

Prelims and MainsCurrent affairs on this: Big cats

The Asiatic lion, Panthera leo persica, is the only lion that still lives wild outside Africa. It is Endangered on the IUCN Red List and in Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. It survives only in the Gir landscape of Saurashtra, Gujarat, in the Gir National Park and Sanctuary and, increasingly, outside them in satellite populations linked by corridors; the 2025 estimate is 891 lions against 523 in 2015, in a range of about 35,000 sq km, nearly half outside protected areas in nine satellite populations.

• Project Lion, announced in 2020, manages the whole landscape rather than a single protected area.
• The 2013 Supreme Court order to translocate lions to Kuno in Madhya Pradesh has not been carried out.
• The constraint is now space, not numbers: the coastal Jafrabad lions stay part of the population only through a strip of forest, and a limestone proposal covers 75 ha of reserved forest on that corridor.
• Lions living among people sometimes attack them, and Gujarat's answer is to take the animal out of the landscape rather than out of the population: it is creating a 100 ha enclosure for lions that have attacked people.

See also: Centre of Excellence on Human Wildlife Conflict