Asiatic Lion Conservation Project (Gir)

The Asiatic Lion Conservation Project was launched in 2018 by India's Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) to secure the survival of Panthera leo persica, the last free-ranging population of which exists in the Gir landscape of Saurashtra, Gujarat. The project draws its legal and institutional foundations from the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, which establishes the framework for protected areas and species-specific schedules, and operates as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme under the broader umbrella of the "Development of Wildlife Habitats" programme. Gir National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary, notified in stages from 1965, forms the core protected habitat, while the project recognises that the lion population has expanded well beyond sanctuary boundaries into a multi-use landscape spanning roughly nine districts. The species had been reduced to perhaps a dozen or two individuals in the early twentieth century before protection by the Nawab of Junagadh; the 2018 scheme represented a formal, dedicated funding commitment to consolidate decades of state-led recovery.

The project's mechanics rest on a combination of habitat management, veterinary infrastructure, disease surveillance, and conflict mitigation, coordinated between the MoEFCC and the Gujarat Forest Department. An initial central outlay of approximately ₹97.85 crore over three years was structured on a roughly 60:40 Centre-to-state cost-sharing basis, with funds channelled toward habitat improvement, water provisioning, prey-base augmentation, and the modernisation of monitoring. Field implementation proceeds through the deployment of GPS-based satellite tracking and radio collars on selected animals, the establishment of a dedicated veterinary care apparatus including the Sakkarbaug Zoo and rescue centres, and the creation of a disease-diagnostic capacity to detect threats such as Canine Distemper Virus (CDV) and Babesia. The Gujarat Forest Department conducts a periodic lion census—formally the Asiatic Lion Population Estimation—every five years, supplemented by the annual full-moon "Poonam Avlokan" observation exercise.

Beyond core protection, the project incorporates capacity-building for frontline staff, the modernisation of patrolling, community engagement through Eco Development Committees, and compensation mechanisms for livestock depredation to reduce retaliatory killing. A central scientific concern addressed by the scheme is the genetic vulnerability inherent in a single, geographically concentrated population, which makes the entire subspecies susceptible to a single epidemic or natural catastrophe. The 2018 CDV outbreak in the Dalkhaniya range of Gir East, which killed more than twenty lions, validated this concern and accelerated investment in vaccine procurement, quarantine facilities, and an in-situ diagnostic laboratory. The project thus blends classical protected-area management with a public-health-style epidemiological response.

Contemporary implementation centres on Gandhinagar, where the Gujarat Forest Department headquarters coordinates with New Delhi's MoEFCC and the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun, which provides technical and ecological expertise. The 2020 estimation recorded 674 lions, up from 523 in 2015, and the 2025 figures released by the Gujarat government reported continued growth, confirming the expansion of lions into coastal and agricultural tracts including the Bhavnagar and Amreli districts. Sites such as the Greater Gir landscape, the Girnar Wildlife Sanctuary, and the coastal Diu corridor feature prominently in dispersal monitoring.

The Asiatic Lion Conservation Project must be distinguished from Project Tiger (1973) and Project Elephant (1992), which are species-specific flagship programmes of national scope administered respectively through the National Tiger Conservation Authority and a dedicated directorate; by contrast the lion scheme is geographically confined to a single landscape under a single state's custodianship and lacks an equivalent statutory authority. It is also distinct from the proposed Asiatic Lion Reintroduction Project, which envisaged translocating a satellite population to Kuno-Palpur in Madhya Pradesh—a plan the Supreme Court endorsed in its April 2013 judgment but which Gujarat has resisted, and which was effectively overtaken when Kuno instead received African cheetahs in 2022.

The central controversy remains the single-site concentration risk. Conservation scientists and the Supreme Court have argued that prudent management requires a second, geographically separate population to insure the subspecies against epidemic, fire, flood, or poaching; Gujarat has historically opposed translocation on grounds of state custodianship and the lions' cultural significance, leaving the 2013 court directive substantially unimplemented. Edge cases include lions ranging into revenue land, railway lines, and open wells, generating periodic mortality, and the growing human-lion interface as the population spreads outside formally protected boundaries. The 2025 launch of "Project Lion" as an expanded, longer-horizon successor framework signals a shift toward landscape-scale planning and habitat security beyond Gir's core.

For the working practitioner—whether a UPSC aspirant addressing GS Paper III environment questions, a wildlife policy researcher, or a desk officer tracking biodiversity commitments—the project exemplifies the tension between conservation success and conservation fragility: a recovering population whose very concentration constitutes its principal vulnerability. It illustrates Centre-state federal dynamics in environmental governance, the role of judicial intervention in species management, and India's obligations under the Convention on Biological Diversity and IUCN Red List frameworks, where the Asiatic lion is classified as Endangered. Understanding its design clarifies why single-population in-situ schemes demand both habitat expansion and disease-resilience planning.