Barda Wildlife Sanctuary in Gujarat may be the second home for Gir lions. While the Environment Ministry recently earmarked an eco-sensitive zone 500 metres to 5.6 km away from its boundaries, the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) has supported the idea of lion conservation in Barda for long-term viability of lions in Saurashtra region in Gujarat.
The eco-sensitive zone earmarked by the Union Ministry of Forests and Environment covers 23 villages. With this, restrictions on mining, setting up of industries and other activities that adversely affect wildlife in the region have come into force.
The sanctuary straddling the border of Porbandar and Jamnagar districts, which was created in 1979 when Chandraprabha (Uttar Pradesh) experiment of lion translocation failed, is yet to host any lion even after 36 years.
The Barda Wildlife Sanctuary is one of the richest and compact biodiversity patches covered on all sides by good quality dry deciduous miscellaneous forests, shrub lands and wetland forests along with bamboo patches. It maintains rich biodiversity comprising 759 species of trees, herbs, shrubs and climbers, 22 mammal species — which include some rare species — 26 species of reptiles, four species of amphibians, 55 species of butterfly, more than 3,000 species of insects, and more than 269 species of birds.
Besides Barda, another sanctuary that is waiting to hear the roars of lions is Kuno-Palpur in Madhya pradesh. A 12-member committee has been formed to oversee translocation of Gir lions to MP in the light of an April 2013 order of the Supreme Court.
Sources said that both these projects — Barda and Kuno — were designed to shift some of the Gir lions in a bid to save them from extinction in the case of an epidemic or natural calamity.
Recently, a study, titled ‘Assessment of Barda landscape for reintroduction of lions’, by Wildlife Institute of India (WII) experts YV Jhala and his team of Kausik Banerjee, Parabita Basu, Stotra Chakrabarti and Subrata Gayen, pointed out how Barda was actively taken up as an alternative site for translocation of Asiatic lions by the Gujarat forest department when Kuno-Palpur was being proposed by wildlife biologists in 1990.
In order to save the Gir lions from becoming extinct, one male lion and two lionesses were introduced in the Chandraprabha Wildlife Sanctuary of Chakia Forest Division in Uttar Pradesh. The numbers of the big cats increased to about 11 within eight years. However, they died within a decade of initial reintroduction, mostly due to retaliatory killings.
The Gujarat Forest department subsequently selected Barda hill as an alternative site for reintroduction of Gir lions. Barda hill was declared a wildlife sanctuary on February 12, 1979 but nothing moved till the 1990s when wildlife biologists selected Kuno in Madhya Pradesh as a potential reintroduction site. Following this, Barda was considered as an alternative site by Gujarat because of its eco-climatic and human community resemblance with many parts of the Gir landscape.
