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

There are about 891 Asiatic lions alive in the wild. Every single one of them lives in one corner of one Indian state.

Not one country. Not one national park. One landscape, in Saurashtra, in Gujarat, centred on the Gir forest. If something goes badly wrong there, it goes wrong for the entire subspecies at once, because there is nowhere else and nothing held in reserve.

India has understood this for at least thirty years. It identified a second home, spent years preparing it, moved more than a thousand people off the land to make room, and was ordered by its own Supreme Court to send the lions. It never did. In 2022 that empty park was filled with cheetahs flown in from Africa instead.

How close it came

The lion used to be an Indian animal in the fullest sense. Its range ran from Mesopotamia and southern Pakistan across northern India as far as Bengal, and it is the animal on the Ashokan capital at Sarnath that India now uses as its state emblem.

Then it was shot, comprehensively, by princely rulers and colonial officers who treated lion hunting as a sport with no obvious limit. By the end of the nineteenth century the survivors were confined to the Gir forest and there were very few of them. The figures usually quoted are a dozen, or fewer than twenty. Those numbers come from estimates made at the time rather than any rigorous count, and some historians think they are too low, so treat them as an order of magnitude rather than a census. The direction of travel is not in doubt.

What saved them was not a conservation movement. It was a landowner. The Nawabs of Junagadh, whose territory contained the forest, restricted lion hunting from around 1879 and clamped down harder in the early 1900s. The motive was partly that the lions were theirs to give away: an invitation to shoot one was a favour a ruler could grant a viceroy. Whatever the reason, the effect was that the last population on earth sat inside a jurisdiction where killing them had become difficult.

It worked. By the mid 1930s there were a couple of hundred. The recovery has continued, unevenly, ever since.

A genuine conservation success

The modern numbers are the good news, and they are worth stating plainly, because Indian conservation stories do not often go this way.

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

That is a population that has more than doubled inside fifteen years, in a crowded state, alongside farms and villages and roads. Gujarat is entitled to be proud of it, and the state's attachment to these animals is not sentimentality: it is the reason they still exist.

The trouble is that a recovery from a bottleneck of a few dozen animals produces a population that is numerous but not diverse. Every lion in Gir is closely related to every other lion in Gir. And they are all standing in the same place.

September 2018

In the second week of September 2018, lions began dying in the Dalkhania range in the eastern part of Gir. Not one or two, which is normal, but a run of them, of all ages, in the same area.

Between 12 and 19 September, eleven died. Another ten died over the following ten days, several of them already in care. By the time it was contained the toll was in the mid to high twenties, and testing eventually found canine distemper virus in samples from dozens of lions and several leopards. The animals had been hit by a combination of CDV and a blood parasite infection.

Canine distemper is the specific nightmare here, and there is a precedent that everybody working on this knows. In 1994 an outbreak of the same virus tore through the lions of the Serengeti and killed roughly a third of them, on the order of a thousand animals. The Serengeti population survived because it was large and spread out.

Gir had, at that point, around 600 lions in one forest. The 2018 outbreak killed perhaps four per cent of the world's Asiatic lions in under a month, and it was stopped by vaccination, quarantine and luck. Nobody involved thinks the next one is impossible.

The second home

None of this was a surprise. The risk of a single population had been the standard argument in Indian conservation since the 1990s, and India did the responsible thing about it, right up until the last step.

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

Between 1998 and 2003, about 1,650 people from 24 villages were resettled out of the sanctuary. A buffer zone of some 924 square kilometres was designated around it. Those families gave up their homes and land so that a forest could be emptied for animals that were going to be brought from somewhere else.

Gujarat did not want to send them. The objection was never really about lion welfare. It was that Gir is the only place on earth with wild Asiatic lions, and that status is worth a great deal to a state, in tourism, in identity and in politics. Sharing the animals means sharing the distinction.

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

That was more than twelve years ago. No lion has been moved.

What went to Kuno instead

Kuno did not stay empty. In December 2018 it was upgraded from a wildlife sanctuary to a national park and enlarged. In January 2022 the environment minister launched an action plan to reintroduce cheetahs to India, with Kuno as the first site. Cheetahs have been extinct in India since the middle of the twentieth century, and the animals available were African ones.

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

Critics of the cheetah project made the connection immediately. The Bhopal-based environmentalist Ajay Dubey argued that putting African cheetahs into Kuno was another way of avoiding the lion transfer: fill the park, and the court order becomes impractical rather than merely ignored.

You do not have to accept that reading to notice the shape of it. A park was cleared of 24 villages for an endangered Indian animal that a court had ordered moved there. The animal never came. The park now holds an African species instead, and the lion order remains unexecuted.

The lions went and solved it themselves

Here is the part that complicates the whole argument, and it is my favourite thing about this story.

While the governments and the courts spent thirty years failing to establish a second population, the lions established several. They simply walked out.

Since the mid 1990s, as numbers climbed, lions have been dispersing out of the protected area into farmland, scrub, plantations and villages. By 2020 there were at least six satellite populations spread across eight districts of Gujarat, living in human-dominated country outside the protected area network. Around a hundred were living near the coast. Only something in the region of 300 to 325 lions were inside Gir National Park itself. Roughly a third of all Asiatic lions now live outside protected areas.

These are not lions in a wilderness. They are lions moving through sugarcane and mango orchards, crossing roads and railway lines, drinking at farm wells, taking the occasional buffalo, and being tolerated by people who have shared the landscape with them for generations. The tolerance is real and remarkable, and it is also being tested, because the costs fall on farmers while the prestige accrues elsewhere.

It does not fully solve the disease problem, since the satellites are close enough to Gir to be reachable by the same outbreak. But it is a hedge nobody planned, achieved by the animals rather than by policy, and Gujarat is now developing Barda, a sanctuary about a hundred kilometres away, as a further home.

What the number actually means

891 is a good number. It is roughly double what it was fifteen years ago, and everyone involved in getting it there deserves the credit.

It is also a number with no second copy. The whole subspecies is a single population in a single landscape, descended from a handful of survivors, and in 2018 it lost most of a month's worth of animals to one virus in one range of one forest. The insurance policy was designed, costed, sited and cleared of its inhabitants, and then not taken out.

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