Two adult Asiatic lions drowned after falling into a 40-feet deep open well in an agriculture farm in Gir forest in Amreli district. A video footage of the lions struggling to get out of the well has also gone viral.
Forest officials said that the lions, a male and female, aged between five and nine years, fell into the well on Friday early morning in Khambha taluka's Kotda village. The area comes under Gir East forest division.
"In the early hours of Friday, we got a message from a farm owner that two lions had fallen into the well. But by the time rescue teams reached the spot, the lions were exhausted and drowned in the well," Deputy Conservator of Forest, Rajdeepsinh Zala, told DH.
Forest officials said that the incident happened quite far away from the protected area where the pride of lions live. Due to the rise in the population -- 674 according to the 2020 census -- the big cats are venturing out of the 30,000 sq km of protected areas into the farm lands where the farmers dug out well for irrigation purposes.
While the forest department has undertaken the task of covering these wells with parapet walls in and around the sanctuary and beyond, new wells come up every year posing danger to the wildlife.
Foresters said that in Gir East division alone, the officials covered 240 such wells while many more remain to be enclosed. An officer said that since 2007, over 11,000 such wells have been covered in his division alone.
For the past several years, dozens of lions were trapped and killed in these wells. According to rough estimates, there are over 60,000 such wells in Gir forest area. To protect the lions from falling into wells, the government gives about Rs 16,000 subsidy to local farmers to cover their wells.