Gujarat's Asiatic Lions Rose From 523 in 2015 to 891 in 2025 and Now Live in 11 Districts, but as of June 2026 No Lion Has Moved to Kuno, the Second Home the Supreme Court Ordered in April 2013

Gujarat’s Forest Department counted 891 Asiatic lions in May 2025, up from 674 in 2020 and 523 in 2015. The Union environment ministry describes the Asiatic lion as a single wild population, found only in India’s Gir landscape, and that population is the 891. No lion has been sent to a second state, although the Supreme Court ordered a second population started at Kuno in Madhya Pradesh on 15 April 2013.

From 284 lions in 1990 to 891 in May 2025

The Press Information Bureau’s release of 10 August 2025 gives 284 lions for 1990. A written Rajya Sabha reply of 13 February 2025, which passed on figures from the Gujarat government, lists 411 for 2010, 523 for 2015 and 674 for 2020. The 2025 count ran from 10 to 13 May over about 35,000 sq km, across 58 talukas (sub-districts) in 11 districts. Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel announced the result on 21 May 2025: 196 adult males, 330 adult females, 140 sub-adults and 225 cubs, according to the PTI report.

That is 217 more lions than in 2020, a rise of 32 percent, and about 70 percent more than in 2015 (891 divided by 523). The same Rajya Sabha reply records that the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the lion from Critically Endangered to Endangered in 2008.

Our piece on how India counts its tigers and lions explains the counting method, which the Forest Department calls direct beat verification. Ravi Chellam, a lion expert and chief executive of the Metastring Foundation, told Mongabay India that the method is open to human error and returns one figure where most wildlife estimates give a range.

Where the extra lions went

The count found lions in Junagadh, Gir Somnath, Bhavnagar, Amreli, Rajkot, Morbi, Surendranagar, Botad, Porbandar, Jamnagar and Devbhumi Dwarka districts, according to Down To Earth. The range grew from about 30,000 sq km in 2020 to about 35,000 sq km in 2025, which Mongabay India reports as a 16.67 percent increase.

The split between Gir and everywhere else depends on whose figure you take. Jaipal Singh, the principal chief conservator of forests, gave 384 lions in Gir National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary and 507 outside. A paper in Global Ecology and Conservation, led by Mohan Ram, a senior Gujarat Forest Department officer, puts 394 in Gir and the areas next to it and describes nine satellite populations beyond, Mongabay India reports. The largest satellite is Savarkundla-Liliya in Amreli district with 125 lions. Jetpur (6 lions) and Babra-Jasdan (4) were recorded for the first time. Lions also live along the Bhavnagar coast, from Sutrapada to Veraval, and around Rajula, Jafrabad and Nageshree.

Girnar is the older satellite. The forests there lie 35 km from Gir and have taken dispersing lions since the late 1990s. A separate paper by Ram and colleagues says Girnar became a legally protected sanctuary in 2008, covers 178.80 sq km, and has moved from being a “sink” habitat, where a population loses more animals than it gains, to a “source” that sends lions out.

Barda is the newest. The Press Information Bureau says lions reached the 192.31 sq km sanctuary in Porbandar and Devbhumi Dwarka districts by natural migration in 2023, and that it held 17 lions, six adults and 11 cubs, by August 2025. Patel said lions had come back to Barda after 143 years. The ministry’s release calls Barda a second home for the species. Chellam holds that satellite populations cannot be treated as separate from Gir, because the sites are close and lions move widely. The same paper, as Mongabay India reports it, reads the dispersal as a sign that the core habitat is almost saturated.

Why the Supreme Court ordered a second home in 2013

The judgment of 15 April 2013, by Justices K S Radhakrishnan and C K Prasad, came in a case brought by the Centre for Environment Law of WWF-India. The Wildlife Institute of India had studied Gir since 1986, and a 1993 workshop in Baroda raised the idea of a second home. Of three sites surveyed in detail, the court recorded, Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary was found most suitable. The court noted that Kuno lay within the lion’s historic range and that Madhya Pradesh had already moved 24 villages out of it.

The court’s central worry was disease. It pointed to canine distemper in the Serengeti in 1994, where 85 percent of the lions carried antibodies to the virus and at least 30 percent of the Serengeti and Mara lions died. The Serengeti-Mara area holds about 2,500 lions over 40,000 sq km, the judgment says, and Gir is smaller on both counts.

Gujarat argued the opposite. The judgment records that the state wildlife board saw no epidemic threat to Gir’s lions, that the lions already form a metapopulation spread over several places in Greater Gir, and that Kuno had too little prey and some tigers. The court ordered the environment ministry to take urgent steps with an expert committee and to carry the order out within six months. It also quashed the ministry’s earlier plan to bring African cheetahs to Kuno, calling it arbitrary and illegal.

The same judgment told the Centre to start recovery programmes for the Great Indian Bustard, the dugong and other endangered species. Our article on the Great Indian Bustard covers one of those species.

What happened after the order

Gujarat filed a review petition and a curative petition, and the court rejected both, Down To Earth reports. A contempt petition by Ajay Dubey, a Madhya Pradesh wildlife activist, was disposed of in March 2018 after the ministry said an expert committee would meet and report to the court.

On 17 September 2022 Prime Minister Narendra Modi released eight cheetahs from Namibia at Kuno. On 28 March 2023 the Centre told a Supreme Court bench of Justices B R Gavai and Vikram Nath that it would re-examine moving lions there, citing the cheetahs, and that it would file a status report within six months. The Centre also said lions were spreading into wider areas and forming several groups, which lowers their exposure to epidemics. Mongabay India’s report of 2 June 2026 says the translocation had still not happened.

In 2018, canine distemper reached Gir

A research letter in Emerging Infectious Diseases, by scientists of the Indian Council of Medical Research’s National Institute of Virology with co-authors from Sakkarbaug Zoo, the Gujarat forest chief’s office and the environment ministry, describes what happened in September 2018. Over about two weeks, 28 lions of all ages died unusually in Gir Wildlife Sanctuary, and 18 more showed signs of illness. Tests on 229 wild and 87 captive lions found canine distemper virus in 56 of the wild and 12 of the captive animals. Six of 52 leopards tested positive too.

The authors write that free-ranging dogs often pose a risk of passing the virus to wildlife, that vaccination is an option, and that moving the Gir lions into different sanctuaries can ensure the species’ protection. Counts of the dead differ by source. Down To Earth reports 23 deaths between 12 September and 1 October 2018, and Scientific American counted 31 by December. On the institute’s advice the government vaccinated the quarantined Gir lions, Scientific American reports. Of 19 lions captured from the sanctuary’s eastern edge, only three survived, and 33 more were quarantined from an adjoining range.

Ticks, heat and a disputed cause in May 2026

In late May 2026 Gujarat Forest Minister Arjun Modhwadia said eight lions, most of them cubs, had died of suspected Babesia, a tick-borne parasite that destroys red blood cells, in Gir Somnath and Amreli districts. Lions within 10 km were isolated and samples went to the Gujarat Biotechnology Research Centre. Down To Earth reported on 31 May that 17 lions were under treatment, some getting blood transfusions. Jaipal Singh told it that no new deaths or infections had been reported since 28 May and that the infection had also occurred in 2025, when around 10 or 11 lions died. Stotra Chakrabarti, a lion researcher at Macalester College, said cubs under a year old survive at about 50 percent, so the toll was unlikely to affect the overall population.

The explanation then changed. The Wire reported on 11 June 2026 that, according to The Indian Express of 5 June, samples tested at the Gujarat Biotechnology Research Centre held no canine distemper virus and no Babesia. It quoted The Hindu of 6 June as reporting Modhwadia saying the eight cubs died of heat and the weakness it causes, and that Babesia was not the cause. He said 12 of the 17 quarantined lions had been released. Both accounts, suspected tick-borne disease in late May and heat on 6 June, come from the same minister, and we found no published laboratory report that names a cause.

Wells, trains and wires

Forest Minister Mulubhai Bera told the Gujarat Assembly in September 2025 that 141 lions died between August 2023 and July 2024 and 166 between August 2024 and July 2025, 307 in all. He put 41 of those down to unnatural causes: 20 falls into wells, 9 drownings in other water, 5 train strikes, 3 electric shocks, 2 road accidents and 2 natural calamities. The Tribune’s report does not say how the other 266 died. The state said it spent Rs 37.35 crore on measures against unnatural deaths over the two years.

Three lions died on railway tracks in Amreli district between 9 and 21 January 2024. In April 2024 the Gujarat High Court, under Chief Justice Sunita Agarwal, called the forest department’s and the railways’ inquiry sketchy and ordered the secretaries of both ministries to set up a high-level committee to establish the cause and fix responsibility.

Chellam told Mongabay India that lions outside Gir now have to cross highways, railway lines, open wells and illegally electrified fences. A 2024 Wildlife Institute of India study found that between 2012 and 2017 the number of villages reporting livestock attacks rose by 105 a year.

What Project Lion pays for

Modi announced Project Lion on 15 August 2020. The environment ministry has approved a 10-year budget of Rs 2,927.71 crore, and a National Referral Centre for wildlife healthcare has been approved on 20.24 hectares at New Pipliya in Junagadh district. The Rajya Sabha reply lists Gujarat’s own allocations for lion protection at Rs 91.03 crore in 2021-22, Rs 129.16 crore in 2022-23 and Rs 155.53 crore in 2023-24.