Asiatic lions thrive in Gujarat park … but for how long?
In Gujarat’s Gir Forest Reserve, the last home of the Asiatic lion, the big cats have been falling into open wells, running into electrified fences, being hit by trains and dying in other unnatural ways.
The deaths are, in an odd way, a measure of Gir’s success at conserving the lion. Numbers have risen to such an extent that more lions are venturing outside the reserve’s protected areas. But the state is looking for a way to minimise the deaths.
A census last year in Gir counted 650 lions – 127 more than in 2015. But in those two years 184 of the big cats died, 32 of them of unnatural causes, state government figures released last month show.
The figures were worrying enough for the Gujarat High Court to take note, appointing Hemang Shah, a lawyer in Ahmedabad, to file a public-interest petition to push the government for action.
The Gir reserve, set up in 1965, sprawls across 1,153 square kilometres in one of the Asiatic lion’s natural habitats. In 1893, there were just 18 lions counted in this region, and the numbers had dwindled all across India.
After Gir was set up, the tally began inching upward: 284 in 1994; 359 in 2005; 411 in 2010.
“The story of the Asiatic lion is actually a wonderful success story in conservation,” says Ravi Chellam, a scientist who has studied Gir’s big cats.
“But given that, success has to be managed properly for it to be sustained in the long term.”
Gir’s protected areas can hold a maximum population of 300 lions. About half of the present population lives, or spends most of its time, outside the reserve’s core protected area.
The 32 lions that died of unnatural causes had been in the reserve’s periphery, where the protected areas meet human settlements.
“So there are electric fences protecting farmers’ fields, or there are roads and train tracks, or there are big open wells,” Mr Shah says. “These are the four ways in which lions are dying.”
Solving these problems was not always straightforward, Mr Shah says. A government proposal to fence off the train tracks will only limit the lions’ natural movements.
“They have a particular territory in which they hunt and you can’t cut them off from that,” he says.
And farmers choose electric fences to most effectively protect their animals from lion attacks.
In his petition, filed on March 21, Mr Shah laid out some suggestions.
“You can lower the speeds of trains in this area, for a start,” he says.
“The roads passing through are open all day but maybe they can be closed off at night, because you have all these cars and trucks just zooming through when lions and cubs are on the move.”
The state was also supposed to build parapets around open wells.
A World Wildlife Fund report says that 187 of them have been built so far.
“But either these parapets are broken, or they’ve been built only on paper, or there are newly excavated wells out there because we still find lions dying by falling into wells,” Mr Shah says.
Mr Chellam points to a parallel problem. In 2013, he says, India’s Supreme Court ruled that some of Gir’s lions should be moved within six months to a new reserve in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
“The translocation was to reduce the risks associated with ‘all your eggs in one basket’ syndrome,” Mr Chellam says.
If an epidemic were to strike Gir it would endanger the only population of lions in the country.
“But even after the court’s order things have moved very slowly,” Mr Chellam says. “The entire translocation project seems to be in limbo.
“The project would have been relevant even if there were 50 lions in Gir. It is all the more relevant now, when there are between 600 and 700 lions there now.”
Regardless of the number, he says, some animals will always wander outside Gir’s protected areas and it would be impossible to completely segregate them from regions inhabited by humans.
“It’s unreasonable to ask the local people, who are usually poor in these areas, to put their lives on hold, to not have roads or to not protect their farm animals,” Mr Chellam says.
“But certainly traffic can be regulated and the speeds of trains can be regulated. It boils down to how people behave.”