Five-year-old Pulsing Ajnera was playing with his brothers in a field near their home in the western Indian state of Gujarat, when a lion “came out of nowhere,” his grieving father said.
“This lion grabbed the child, my youngest, and left. My family tried everything to rescue him. They threw stones at the lion and a few wooden sticks as well, but (it) dragged him into the jungle,” Heera Ajnera said. The boy’s body was later recovered.
Pulsing was one of seven people in India killed by lions in the year to June 2025, taking the total number of fatal attacks in five years to more than 20. Attacks on cattle have almost doubled during the same period, Gujarat officials told CNN.
Sporting an unmistakable dark mane and unique folds of skin along their bellies, Asiatic lions are slightly smaller than their African cousins. They once prowled the Middle East and Asia but now Gujarat is home to the world’s last population of wild Asiatic lions.
The lions were hunted to the brink of extinction in India, before a ban on killing the cats was put in place in Gujarat a century ago. Recent conservation efforts, have seen the state’s lion population rise by 30% to 891 in the last five years.
Conservationists say a large part of the success stems from a unique human-lion relationship, where locals profit from the presence of lions, and lions are given space to roam. But that symbiotic relationship is being tested as the lion population grows.
“Lions have been found in basement parking lots of hotels…on top of people’s homes. They are resting on terraces. They’re sitting there and roaring,” said wildlife biologist Ravi Chellam, the coordinator of conservation network the Biodiversity Collaborative.
“The minute a lion moves into human-dominated habitats, the probability (of it attacking humans) just increases,” he said.
For more than a decade, Chellam and other conservationists have been pushing the Gujarat government to move some lions to a second habitat outside the state.
But Gujarat’s lions haven’t gone anywhere, and their numbers are continuing to grow – creating the potential for conflict – despite a Supreme Court ruling ordering the government to relocate them.
An expanding population
Gir National Park – a 545-square-mile protected area about the size of Los Angeles City – was established in 1965 to protect endangered species, including Asiatic lions. Most of Gujarat’s Asiatic lions now live outside the park’s borders, mixing with humans in towns and villages.
“Theoretically, it’s a success story because that was the whole intention of a conservation project – to increase the number of individuals of that species,” Gujarat-based conservationist Jehan Bhujwala told CNN.
“But when you have too many animals, they claim space outside of the protected area… and then they start coming into conflict with local (people),” he said.
Bhujwala says India’s conservation model was never intended to separate lions from humans, noting that villages are built within national parks.
“They all coexisted, and that coexistence, that tolerance, is something which is very unique to India’s conservation history,” he said.
Local people rely on lions to generate tourism income, and in return big cats feed on old cattle abandoned by local herders, wrote Yadvendradev Vikramsinh Jhala, the former dean of Wildlife Institute of India, in an academic paper published last year.
Jhala and his co-authors said the lions also prey on pigs and nilgais – a type of antelope – which helps eliminate animals the local farmers consider to be pests.
The community has learned to live with lions because their economic benefits outweigh the risks, said Jhala.
“Such a level of coexistence between people and a large carnivore is not seen anywhere in the world,” he told CNN.
The tie with the local people runs deep.
“If there are Maldharis, there are lions. We are one,” said Lakshman, a 32-year-old farmer from the local Maldhari community.
But Lakshman, who farms buffaloes and sells their milk to support his five children and wife, said he had noticed an uptick in lion attacks on cattle, which experts say have deepened grievances within the pastoral community.
Conservationists warn the dynamic between lions and humans could soon change if more is not done to address the lions’ growing population.
Stalled translocation plan
Chellam is among a group of conservationists who have been urging the government to move some of the lions to Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. A survey he and other scientists completed three decades ago found it to be a suitable habitat for lion conservation.
The call was at the heart of a court battle jointly filed by the Centre for Environment Law and the World Wide Fund for Nature India against the government in 1994 to force local officials in Gujarat to act. In 2013, the Supreme Court of India ruled in favor of the environmental groups, directing the Ministry of Environment to take “urgent steps for the re-introduction of Asiatic Lions from Gir Forests to Kuno.” It was to be initiated within six months, starting with the formation of an expert committee.
Chellam, who’s on the committee, said the last meeting was held in 2016. He says by not convening regular meetings, the government is dragging its feet on the Supreme Court order.
More than a decade after the ruling, the lions remain solely in Gujarat. Further complicating the process is the arrival of cheetahs imported from South Africa and Namibia to the Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary.
The first cheetahs arrived in India in 2022 under a historic plan to revive the species 70 years after their extinction in the country. Some cubs died soon after, but 31 are now living in Kuno, indicating “successful population growth,” according to a paper published in May that countered criticism of the program.
The cheetah program is part of the Indian government’s push to transform the country into a global leader in feline conservation. In 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the International Big Cat Alliance to save seven big cats – tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards, cheetahs, jaguars and pumas – which now has 11 member countries.
Chellam said the cheetahs’ presence in Kuno would further delay the lion translocation – if it’s still the plan – by up to 20 years – the time it takes for the cheetah population to settle before another species can be brought in.
Gujarat’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Jaipal Singh declined CNN’s request to comment on the latest developments.
Resistance to the translocation also comes from local authorities and people in the tourism industry, who are wary of losing business and the state’s exclusivity as the only place in India to see lions in the wild, Chellam explained.
Efforts to keep lions in Gujarat
The Gujarat government has come up with an alternative to the Kuno translocation.
It’s proposing to move some lions to the Barda Wildlife Sanctuary within state borders, noting that 17 Asiatic lions had been sighted there for the first time since 1879.
It’s also increased funding for lion protection by over 70% in the last three years to $18.2 million in 2023-2024 – a sign of its commitment to protecting the species.
But Chellam says Barda is too small and short on prey to sustain a viable lion population.
It’s also too close to Gir National Park to prevent the spread of disease, meaning a catastrophic pandemic could wipe out Gujarat’s entire population of Asiatic lions.
“Having all your eggs in one basket is very risky. If there is a disease outbreak, then there is trouble for you,” he said.
Pulsing’s father, Ajnera, used to think that humans could co-exist with lions. He moved to the Amreli district, known for lion sightings, seven years ago as a farm laborer.
His home was 200 meters away from the forest, and it never occurred to him that lions would attack humans. “This generally does not happen here,” he said.
Now, the grieving father has changed his mind. “We could not live there anymore. We left the area and moved to another village 5 kilometers (3 miles) away – out of fear,” he said.
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Source: Aishwarya S. Iyer, Chris Lau, Esha Mitra – CNN
