India moved 24 villages for lions that never came. Kuno got cheetahs.

About 891 Asiatic lions live in the wild. All of them live in one corner of one Indian state.

That corner is one landscape in Saurashtra, Gujarat, around the Gir forest. If something goes badly wrong there, it goes wrong for the whole subspecies at the same time. There is no other place and no reserve population.

India has known this for at least thirty years. It found a second home and spent years to prepare it. It moved more than a thousand people off the land to make space. Its own Supreme Court ordered it to send the lions.

It never sent them. In 2022, cheetahs from Africa went into that empty park instead.

How close the end came

The lion was once a fully Indian animal. Its range went from Mesopotamia and southern Pakistan across northern India to Bengal. It is the animal on the Ashokan capital at Sarnath, and India now uses that capital as its state emblem.

Then princely rulers and colonial officers shot almost all of them. For these men, lion hunting was a sport with no clear limit. By the end of the nineteenth century, the survivors lived only in the Gir forest, and very few were left.

People usually quote a dozen, or fewer than twenty. These numbers are estimates from that time, not careful counts, and some historians think they are too low. So treat them as a rough size, not a census. But nobody disputes that the population almost disappeared.

A landowner saved them. The forest was in the territory of the Nawabs of Junagadh. The Nawabs limited lion hunting from around 1879 and made the rules stricter in the early 1900s.

Part of the reason was that the lions were theirs to give away. A ruler could give a viceroy an invitation to shoot one, as a favour. Whatever the reason, the result was clear. The last population on earth lived in a territory where it was now difficult to kill them.

It worked. By the mid 1930s, there were a couple of hundred lions. The recovery has continued since then, but not evenly.

A real conservation success

The modern numbers are good news. Indian conservation stories do not often give us good news.

411 lions in 2010. 523 in 2015. 650 in 2017. 674 in the count after that. And in 2025, 891.

The population more than doubled in fifteen years. This happened in a crowded state, next to farms, villages and roads. Gujarat has the right to be proud of it. The lions still exist because the state cares about them.

But there is a problem. These lions all come from a bottleneck of a few dozen animals. So the population is large, but it is not genetically diverse. Every lion in Gir is a close relative of every other lion in Gir. And they all live in the same place.

September 2018

In the second week of September 2018, lions started to die in the Dalkhania range in the east of Gir. One or two deaths are normal. This was a series of deaths, of lions of all ages, in the same area.

Between 12 and 19 September, eleven lions died. Another ten died in the next ten days, and several of these were already in care. When the outbreak was under control, the total was in the mid to high twenties.

Tests later found canine distemper virus in samples from dozens of lions and several leopards. The animals had two diseases at the same time: CDV and a blood parasite infection.

Canine distemper is the specific nightmare here. Everybody in this field knows a precedent. In 1994, an outbreak of the same virus went through the lions of the Serengeti. It killed about a third of them, on the order of a thousand animals. The Serengeti population survived because it was large and spread out.

At that time, Gir had around 600 lions in one forest. The 2018 outbreak killed perhaps four per cent of the world's Asiatic lions in less than a month. Vaccination, quarantine and luck stopped it. Nobody involved thinks that the next outbreak is impossible.

The second home

None of this was a surprise. Since the 1990s, the risk of a single population has been the standard argument in Indian conservation. India did the responsible things about it, up to the last step.

Biologists at the Wildlife Institute of India surveyed possible sites for a second lion population. They ranked Kuno-Palpur, in Sheopur and Morena districts of Madhya Pradesh, as the best. Then the state started work to make it suitable.

Between 1998 and 2003, about 1,650 people from 24 villages moved out of the sanctuary. The government set a buffer zone of about 924 square kilometres around it. Those families gave up their homes and land. They did this so that the forest could be empty for animals from another place.

Gujarat did not want to send the lions. Lion welfare was never the main reason. Gir is the only place on earth with wild Asiatic lions. That status is worth a lot to a state, in tourism, in identity and in politics. If Gujarat shares the animals, it also shares the distinction.

The dispute went to court. In April 2013, the Supreme Court of India ordered Gujarat to move some of the Gir lions to Madhya Pradesh to start a second population. It gave the authorities six months.

That was more than twelve years ago. Nobody has moved a single lion.

What went to Kuno instead

Kuno did not stay empty. In December 2018, the government made it a national park instead of a wildlife sanctuary, and made it larger. In January 2022, the environment minister started an action plan to bring cheetahs back to India, with Kuno as the first site.

Cheetahs have been extinct in India since the middle of the twentieth century. The only animals available were African ones.

On 17 September 2022, the Prime Minister released eight cheetahs from Namibia into Kuno on his birthday. Twelve more came from South Africa in February 2023.

Critics of the cheetah project saw the connection at once. Ajay Dubey, an environmentalist from Bhopal, said that the African cheetahs were another way to avoid the lion transfer. If you fill the park, the court order becomes impractical, not only ignored.

Whatever the motive, the order of events is on record. The government cleared 24 villages from a park for an endangered Indian animal. A court had ordered that animal moved there. The animal never came. The park now holds an African species, and nobody has carried out the lion order.

The lions solved it themselves

For thirty years, the governments and the courts failed to start a second population. In that time, the lions started several. They simply walked out. This is my favourite part of the story, and it makes the whole argument more complex.

Since the mid 1990s, the numbers have gone up, and lions have moved out of the protected area. They now live in farmland, scrub, plantations and villages. By 2020, there were at least six satellite populations in eight districts of Gujarat. They lived in country full of people, outside the network of protected areas.

Around a hundred lions lived near the coast. Only about 300 to 325 lions lived inside Gir National Park itself. Roughly a third of all Asiatic lions now live outside protected areas.

These lions move through sugarcane fields and mango orchards. They cross roads and railway lines, drink at farm wells and sometimes take a buffalo. The local people have shared the land with them for generations, and they accept them.

This tolerance is real and remarkable. But it is also under pressure, because the farmers pay the costs while other people get the prestige.

This does not fully solve the disease problem. The satellite groups are near enough to Gir for the same outbreak to reach them. But it is a safety net that nobody planned. The animals made it, not the policy. Gujarat is now also developing Barda, a sanctuary about a hundred kilometres away, as another home.

What the number really means

891 is a good number. It is about double the number of fifteen years ago. Everyone who helped to get it there deserves the credit.

But this number has no second copy. The whole subspecies is one population in one landscape. It comes from a handful of survivors. In 2018, one virus in one range of one forest killed most of a month's worth of animals.

The insurance policy was designed, costed and given a site. The people on that site moved out. Then nobody took the policy out.

Twenty four villages moved for it. The lions never arrived. The cheetahs did.