PIB TrackerAsiatic lion count crosses 891 ahead of big-cat summit
Gir's lion population rose 32% since 2020, as India readies the first International Big Cat Alliance Summit.
What happened
- The Union Environment Minister inaugurated a 'Lion' Species Spotlight event at Sasan Gir, Gujarat, staged as a pre-summit species event in the run-up to the International Big Cat Alliance (IBCA) Summit 2026.
- India will host the first-ever IBCA Summit in New Delhi on 1–2 June 2026 under the Prime Minister's chairmanship, carrying the tagline "Save Big Cats, Save Humanity, Save Ecosystem".
- The summit is expected to bring together about 400 representatives from 95 range countries spanning Asia, Africa and the Americas.
- The Greater Gir landscape's Asiatic lion population was reported at about 891 individuals in 2025, a 32% rise over the 2020 estimate.
- Alongside the spotlight event, a Lion Conservation Brochure was released, and new conservation measures around dispersal and wildlife health were highlighted.
- The release frames the Asiatic lion as the flagship of a worsening global picture — lion populations worldwide have declined by more than 30% on the back of habitat loss.
Background & context
This announcement sits at the intersection of three distinct things a UPSC aspirant must keep separate: a species (the Asiatic lion), a domestic conservation mission (Project Lion), and an international conservation body (the IBCA). The spotlight event is essentially a curtain-raiser that knits all three together ahead of the New Delhi summit.
The International Big Cat Alliance is a multi-country coalition for the conservation of seven big-cat species. It grew out of an idea the Prime Minister had floated in 2019, and was formally launched by India in 2023 — the year that also marked the 50th anniversary of Project Tiger. It was conceived as a treaty-based, multilateral platform headquartered in India, with its administering chain running through the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and its forest and wildlife wings. The Alliance pools expertise, funding and technical support for range, non-range and conservation-partner countries that host or support any of the seven cats, and is designed to standardise monitoring, anti-poaching and habitat-management practice across continents. The IBCA is a separate construct from older conservation regimes such as CITES (a trade-control convention) or the IUCN (the body behind the Red List); it is India-anchored and big-cat-specific rather than a general wildlife-trade or red-list institution, and membership is open beyond the cats' natural range.
Project Lion, launched by the Government of India in 2020 and administered by the Environment Ministry through the Gujarat Forest Department, is the domestic spine of this effort. It is a landscape-based programme for the long-term conservation of the Asiatic lion, built around habitat restoration, scientific population management and ecological resilience, rather than around a single fenced reserve. Its working components, as reflected in the release, include rigorous population estimation, dedicated wildlife-health infrastructure, and active management of new dispersal areas so that lions can spread beyond the historic core. It belongs to the same family of species-recovery programmes as Project Tiger (1973), Project Elephant (1992) and the more recent Project Cheetah, sharing their landscape-and-corridor philosophy while being tailored to a single, geographically concentrated population. Compared with Project Tiger — which manages a network of dozens of reserves across many States through the National Tiger Conservation Authority — Project Lion confronts the opposite problem: not how to coordinate a scattered metapopulation, but how to spread a single dense one safely across more than one landscape.
The species itself has a deep historical arc worth carrying. The Asiatic lion once ranged across West Asia and northern and central India, but hunting and habitat loss collapsed its range until, by the early twentieth century, only a small remnant survived in the Gir forest, protected at the initiative of the then Nawab of Junagadh. From that bottleneck of a few dozen animals, sustained protection and a series of census exercises rebuilt the population across the Gir Protected Area and the wider "Greater Gir" landscape that now includes satellite populations along the Saurashtra coast. The ~891 figure cited for 2025 represents the latest point on that long recovery curve.
For Prelims
- Entity in the news: Asiatic lion (Panthera leo persica / leo), surviving as a single wild population in India's Gir landscape in Gujarat.
- Population: ~891 in the Greater Gir landscape (2025 figure cited in the release), up about 32% over the 2020 estimate.
- Legal protection: the Asiatic lion has the highest legal cover — Appendix-I of CITES and Schedule-I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.
- Project Lion: launched 2020; landscape-based conservation through habitat restoration, population management and ecological resilience.
- Named initiatives: Asiatic Lion Population Estimation; the National Wildlife Referral Centre at Junagadh; and Barda Wildlife Sanctuary developed as a new (second) dispersal site for lions.
- IBCA: launched by India in 2023; covers seven big cats — Tiger, Lion, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Cheetah, Jaguar and Puma.
- IBCA Summit 2026: first edition, New Delhi, 1–2 June 2026; ~400 representatives from 95 range countries; tagline "Save Big Cats, Save Humanity, Save Ecosystem".
- Geographic note: of the seven IBCA cats, the Jaguar and the Puma are New-World cats not found in India; the Cheetah was extinct in India until reintroduction. The Asiatic lion is found only in Gujarat's Gir landscape.
For the "match the seven cats / how many of these occur in India" pattern, hold the full IBCA set and which members India hosts. Of the seven, India is home to the Tiger, the Asiatic Lion, the (Indian) Leopard, the Snow Leopard (Himalayas) and, post-reintroduction, the Cheetah — five of the seven. The Jaguar (Americas) and the Puma / cougar / mountain lion (Americas) do not occur wild in India. This is exactly the kind of distractor a statement question is built on.
Why it matters
The single-population status of the Asiatic lion is both the conservation success story and its central vulnerability. A population recovering past 891 from the brink of a few dozen a century ago shows what sustained, landscape-scale protection can achieve. But concentration in one landscape means a single epizootic — such as the 2018 canine distemper virus deaths in Gir — could undo decades of work overnight. That biological logic explains the policy moves the release flags: estimating numbers rigorously, building a dedicated wildlife referral (veterinary) centre, and opening a second dispersal site at Barda so the species is not staking its entire survival on one forest.
The IBCA Summit lifts this from a domestic story to a diplomatic one. By anchoring a seven-cat alliance in India and hosting its first summit, India is positioning itself as a convener of global biodiversity governance — using its credentials in tiger, lion and cheetah recovery as soft-power capital. The "Save Big Cats, Save Humanity, Save Ecosystem" framing also makes the case that apex predators are umbrella species: protect their range and the entire food web, watershed and carbon-storing forest beneath them is protected too. That is the problem the announcement ultimately addresses — habitat loss driving a 30%-plus global decline in lions, and the need for a coordinated, funded, cross-continental response.
There is also a developmental dimension that examiners reward when it is named. Around Gir, lion recovery has had to be reconciled with the lives of pastoral communities such as the Maldhari, whose grazing and settlement patterns overlap the cats' range; conservation here is therefore a question of coexistence and managing human-wildlife conflict, not just of fencing off forest. A growing, dispersing population raises the frequency of lions straying into farmland, revenue forests and even the coastal periphery, which makes compensation mechanisms, early-warning systems and community participation as central to the programme as biology. The dispersal site at Barda and the referral centre at Junagadh are, in that sense, both ecological and social instruments — they let the population grow without forcing every additional lion into the same crowded core.
Finally, the timing carries weight. Convening the first IBCA Summit immediately after a fresh, rising census figure lets India present a proof-of-concept to the 95 range countries it has invited: that a determined, well-funded, science-led national programme can reverse a big cat's decline. For range states in Africa and the Americas struggling with shrinking lion, cheetah, jaguar and puma numbers, the Gir model — and the data behind it — becomes the template the Alliance is built to share.