The Gir National
Park and Sanctuary is spread over an area of 1,412 sq km, and hangs
on the southern tip of western India’s Kathiawar peninsula. The
Nawab of Junagarh at the turn of the 19th century decided to save the
18 lions left in the wild, and over a century the number has grown to
350. But the genetic pool of the present population remains small. The
risk of a contagious disease is very real. Inbreeding leaves the cats
with a weaker immune system and makes them susceptible to epidemics.
In 1994 Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park lost 1,000 lions to
a mysterious epidemic called Canine Distemper. It was later found that
dogs and hyenas were responsible for the infection.
Chief
Minister Narendra Modi calls the lions the pride of Gujarat and
won’t let them be shifted |
That incident was
a wake up call. A year later, Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun,
suggested creation of another viable population in Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary
in Madhya Pradesh. Since then, the forest dwellers in Kuno have been
relocated out of the sanctuary to create a viable lion habitat.
But Chief Minister
Narendra Modi calls lions the pride of Gujarat. “To be honest
to you, I don’t agree with the government’s position,”
says a top forest official who does not want to be quoted. “I
must confess it’s a political decision not to allow the lions
to go out of Gujarat.”
The Forest department
of Gujarat argues that the temperature in Kuno is too high; tigers and
lions do not coexist; and that settlements there would be affected by
the presence of lions. Wright disagrees: “Lions stray outside
GNP to human settlements because it is packed inside. That would not
be so in Kuno. Public awareness can be created. The whole debate is
misplaced.”
The chief wildlife
warden of Gujarat, Pradeep Khanna, says it is not. “Who says we
are against relocation? Lions are themselves relocating to areas they
deem fit. Several prides of lions have moved out of Gir. We plan to
declare these places as protected areas. We have already started doing
so. To start with, we have already declared an area of 18 sq km as protected.
The whole Kathiawar peninsula offers excellent habitat to lions. So
why disturb them?”
And so the deadlock
over shifting the lions to another habitat to create more than one viable
population continues.
