Gir National Park

Gir National Park, located in the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat, is the last refuge of the Asiatic lion (Panthera leo persica) in the wild. Its conservation lineage predates Indian independence: the Nawab of Junagadh, Muhammad Mahabat Khanji III, imposed a hunting moratorium around 1900 after the lion population collapsed to a reported two dozen animals due to colonial-era trophy shooting. The area was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1965, and a core zone of roughly 258 square kilometres was constituted as a national park in 1975 under the framework that the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 later formalised. Today the larger Gir Protected Area complex—encompassing the national park, the surrounding sanctuary, and the Pania and Mitiyala sanctuaries—covers approximately 1,400 square kilometres of dry deciduous forest, thorn scrub, and savanna.

The legal architecture governing Gir operates through the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, which distinguishes a national park (Section 35) from a wildlife sanctuary (Section 18 and Section 26A) by the stringency of permitted activities. Within a national park no grazing of livestock and no alteration of boundaries is allowed except by resolution of the State Legislature, and no rights of any person subsist except as expressly permitted. The Chief Wildlife Warden of Gujarat exercises management authority, issuing permits for entry and regulating tourism through designated routes such as the Devalia Interpretation Zone. The Asiatic lion is additionally listed in Schedule I of the Act, conferring the highest level of species protection and prescribing the most severe penalties for poaching.

Management practice at Gir blends species protection with the relocation of human settlements known locally as nesses, inhabited by the pastoralist Maldhari community. Beginning in the 1970s, the forest department resettled many Maldhari families outside the core zone to reduce grazing pressure and livestock competition with wild prey such as chital, sambar, nilgai, and wild boar. The Asiatic lion is also protected under international instruments: it is listed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. India operates the dedicated Lion Conservation Project, and the species featured in the integrated development scheme "Project Lion" announced in 2020.

The lion census, conducted by the Gujarat Forest Department at roughly five-year intervals, has charted a sustained recovery. The 2015 estimate recorded 523 lions; the 2020 enumeration, conducted as the "Poonam Avlokan" full-moon observation exercise, reported 674; and the June 2025 census placed the population above 890 animals distributed across an expanding range that now spills well beyond the protected boundary into agricultural districts and coastal tracts of Amreli, Bhavnagar, and Gir Somnath. This geographic dispersal beyond Junagadh underscores both the success and the spatial limits of a single-population strategy.

Gir must be distinguished from adjacent conservation categories. Unlike a tiger reserve designated under Project Tiger and administered through the National Tiger Conservation Authority, Gir is a lion habitat with no comparable statutory authority; its closest institutional analogue is the proposed translocation site at Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. Gir is not a biosphere reserve in the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere sense, nor is it a Ramsar wetland; it is a terrestrial protected area whose flagship is a single critically concentrated felid subspecies. Confusing the national park proper with the larger sanctuary complex is a common error, as the two carry different legal restrictions on grazing and habitation.

The most consequential controversy concerns translocation. In April 2013 the Supreme Court of India, in Centre for Environmental Law, WWF-India v. Union of India, directed the shifting of some Asiatic lions from Gir to Kuno-Palpur within six months, reasoning that a single population is vulnerable to epidemic and natural disaster. Gujarat resisted implementation, and the relocation has not occurred. The risk the court anticipated materialised in 2018, when a canine distemper virus and babesiosis outbreak killed more than two dozen lions in the Dalkhaniya range, validating epidemiological concerns about over-concentration. The court's order remains substantially unexecuted, making Gir a standing case study in centre-state friction over wildlife federalism.

For the working practitioner—whether a civil-services aspirant preparing General Studies Paper III, an environment desk officer, or a conservation policy analyst—Gir exemplifies the tension between in-situ success and the precautionary principle. It demonstrates how a sub-national government can build a globally significant conservation outcome while simultaneously frustrating a court-mandated risk-mitigation strategy. The case integrates statutory interpretation of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, the federal distribution of forest and wildlife competence on the Concurrent List, IUCN and CITES classifications, and the ecological logic of metapopulation management. Gir thus serves as a compact illustration of how species recovery, community displacement, judicial intervention, and political sovereignty intersect within a single protected landscape.