IWN Daily Digest — Thursday, 20 August 2026
Gujarat’s forest department has begun fencing 100 hectares of Ambardi Safari Park to house Asiatic lions that have attacked people, creating a new address within Gir’s landscape for animals the state no longer wants roaming free.
The Enclosure
Ambardi Safari Park sits near Dhari in Amreli district, part of the wider Gir Protected Area on Gujarat’s Saurashtra peninsula. It already draws safari tourists hoping to see lions, leopards, chital and nilgai. Now a section of it — 100 hectares, according to Gujarat’s Forest Department — will be fenced off specifically for lions involved in attacks on humans, ANI reports.
Dr Jaipal Singh, Gujarat’s Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and Head of Forest Force, told ANI that instructions have been issued and work has begun. Lions moved into the enclosure will be kept in a suitable environment within their natural habitat, he said, rather than sent to a zoo or held in permanent captivity elsewhere. The announcement came on 9 August, the eve of World Lion Day.
Rising Numbers
The timing coincided with Gujarat’s World Lion Day event the following day, during which the Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Bhupender Yadav, told ANI that India’s Asiatic lion population had climbed to 891 — up from 674 in the 2020 count, and more than 70 per cent higher than the 523 recorded in 2015. Officials also pointed to the species’ expanding range: from around 30,000 square kilometres in 2020 to nearly 35,000 square kilometres now, spread across eleven districts.
Project Lion, launched in 2020, set out to grow the population exactly like this, but Gujarat now has to fit that many lions into a landscape that hasn’t grown.
Growing Pains
More lions need more space, and Gir’s core forest hasn’t grown to match. A growing share of Gujarat’s lions now spend their time well outside the sanctuary boundary, in farmland, riverine belts and villages on Saurashtra’s edges, which puts them in closer and more frequent contact with people than a purely forest-dwelling population would be. Attacks on people, though still rare set against the size of the population, have been frequent enough this year to draw sustained local coverage and pressure on the forest department to act.
Ambardi’s new enclosure is one visible response. It gives forest officials somewhere specific to send a lion once it has been identified as dangerous, rather than managing the animal in the open landscape where it was caught. The department has not yet said how many lions it expects to hold there, or when the fencing work will be complete.
Sources: ANI — World Lion Day: Gujarat to set up 100-hectare enclosure at Ambardi for lions involved in human attacks · ANI — India’s Asiatic lion population rises from 523 to 891: Bhupender Yadav · Gujarat Forest Department — Ambardi Safari Park
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