Junagadh’s Sakkarbaug Zoological Park is set to part with four Asiatic lions. Mumbai’s civic body, the BMC, said on Thursday that both zoos have agreed to an exchange in which two male and two female lions go to the Veermata Jijabai Bhosale Udyan in Byculla, and six tufted capuchin monkeys come back to Junagadh, DeshGujarat reported. Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel, who met Mumbai Mayor Ritu Tawde at his Gandhinagar residence on Wednesday, has told the forest department to finish the paperwork and the memorandum of understanding between the two zoos quickly.
No date has been fixed for the lions to travel. The BMC expects a formal approval letter and a draft MoU from Gujarat shortly, and the transfer still needs the usual statutory clearances, including those of the Central Zoo Authority (CZA), according to the Free Press Journal.
Why Mumbai has chased these lions since February
Byculla Zoo, which Mumbaikars call Rani Baug, has had no lion for twelve years. Its last big cat, Jimmy, was an African-Asiatic hybrid born at the zoo in 1998; he died in 2014 after a long illness. The BMC tried more than once to replace him, including an offer of zebras to zoos in Junagadh and Indore, and got nowhere. Tawde wrote to Patel in February this year asking for two pairs of lions as a goodwill gesture. Sakkarbaug gave an in-principle nod, and in May the BMC’s zoo approved the exchange under CZA norms, the Free Press Journal reported at the time. Mumbai has since built a lion enclosure under a CZA-approved master plan, so the animals have somewhere to go once the papers are signed.
Wednesday’s meeting was the final political push. Tawde also called on Gujarat’s minister of state for forests, Pravin Mali, who passed the request to the forest department’s principal secretary for action. Dhrangadhra MLA Prakash Varmora and BMC zoo director Dr Sanjay Tripathi sat in on the discussion with the chief minister.
What Sakkarbaug gets, and why it is monkeys
The return consignment is three male and three female tufted capuchins, a small South American primate. Byculla does not breed them; it plans to buy them through an authorised agency, and the May proposal was for the monkeys to fly straight to Junagadh for quarantine rather than pass through Mumbai first, to spare them a second round of handling. That detail matters for Sakkarbaug, which will have to ready a primate enclosure and a quarantine routine for a new species.
For Junagadh, four lions is a modest outgoing. Sakkarbaug, which opened in 1863, runs the country’s main conservation breeding programme for the Asiatic lion with the CZA, and lion pairs have left it for zoos across India for decades, from Assam to Madhya Pradesh. Our earlier report on the zoo’s Indian grey wolf breeding success shows how central captive breeding is to its work. The exchange does not touch the wild population in Gir and the wider Saurashtra landscape; these are zoo-born animals.
The paperwork still ahead
Three steps remain before a truck leaves Junagadh. Gujarat has to issue the approval letter and sign the MoU; the CZA has to clear the inter-zoo transfer; and the capuchins have to be imported with their own permissions. None of these has a public deadline, which is why neither side has named an arrival date. If the timetable slips, it will most likely be on the primate import, which involves an overseas purchase and quarantine, not on the lions.
Sources: DeshGujarat, Free Press Journal (November 5), Free Press Journal (May 26)
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.