These are villages and maybe some small towns dotted around the Gir National Park (only place in world that has the Asian lion in their natural habitat). The cities are much further away.
Some cities yeah you are right that leopards are known to intrude or even exist to some degree being small enough (and that city area being more of a suburb or having a park/green area nearby etc rather than inner built up core etc).
But the big cats its more difficult for them, generally its human settlements of the smaller sizes nearer to their forest domains that they have some intersection with...especially where say cattle husbandry/grazing are vectors to try their luck on.
Lions have their established pride behaviour, so there is proclivity for lone males (without a pride to defend/rely on) to try their luck more away from the national park area itself.
Basically the national park is at its near full capacity now as to the lion population it holds from the success of the conservation effort there (along with the larger project tiger one too).....but at same time India human population has grown and has its economic activities wherever possible in competition with the natural forest.
The forest service (both the federal one and also the various state level ones) are some of the govt depts that are pretty well run overall (they have dedicated colleges, universities, great program + training, assured funding etc).... producing this success now that now needs outlet/replication to sustain at a higher capacity for the lion (to say get closer to total tiger population level first, and then see what to do after that w.r.t investments possible for more conservation as India urbanises more and maybe more villages/towns can be translocated from or converted to more natural habitat slowly with investment there)
You can get an idea of the issue with google street view, it's coverage has improved drastically in India lately (since I last checked anyway):
View attachment 71283
i.e the "bald spots" correspond pretty much to the natural habitats of India. Gir national park definitely sticks out as you zoom out...and at first zoom level you can see the circle of villages around the park that this footage came from somewhere. Junagadh, Amreli and Bhavnagar are really the first cities that appear as you zoom out.....and then you get the proper large sized cities as you zoom out further etc.
The last one I marked Kuno national park (another bald spot) where there is an effort to slowly introduce the asiatic lion there....again because of the investments made regarding the forestry services, training and protection required (compared to larger areas you see on the map). Kuno is where they have started introducing the cheetah too (slowly) so it makes sense to leverage those existing resouces invested for a potential lion project there too etc.
Anyway I figured I would type this up to some detail since google earth coverage of India surprised me just now and I can repost this elsewhere easily for similar folks I know interested in conservation in India heh.
