Prime Minister, Narendra Modi on September 17, released a coalition of cheetahs into the Kuno National Park, in Madhya Pradesh.
Eight Cheetahs — five of which are female — were flown from Windhoek, Namibia to Gwalior, followed by a helicopter ride to the grasslands of Kuno Palpur.
The cheetahs were brought in wooden crates and will be released in a specially designed enclosure where they will live for a month and begin a lifetime of acclimatisation to Indian prey and forest conditions.
Mr. Modi, in a televised address, said it could be “months” before ordinary citizens could visit Kuno to spot the animals. “They have now come as guests and it will take some time before they can be used to living in India,” he said.
The cheetah are radio-collared and their movements will be tracked. Each animal has their dedicated tracking team. There is also a team of wildlife scientists, biologists and Laurie Marker, a renowned zoologist and founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund which has worked on restoring the species in Africa.
The introduction of the cheetah in India is being done under Project Cheetah which, according to the Environment Ministry, is the first time a large carnivorous species has been moved across continents for establishing a new population.
“Decades ago, the age-old link of biodiversity that was broken and became extinct, today we have a chance to restore it,” said Mr. Modi, adding “Today the cheetah has returned to the soil of India.”
He remarked that even though cheetahs had become extinct from India in 1952, no meaningful effort was made to rehabilitate them for the past seven decades.
The process to bring cheetahs into India spans several decades including an ingenious proposal in 2005 by the CSIR — Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, to clone an Asiatic cheetah. This came to naught after Iran, where the species was extant but dwindling, refused to share an animal.
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In 2010, the Environment Ministry put together a plan recommending locations in India suitable for the cheetah and for sourcing cheetahs from Africa. This however brought legal problems as conservationists challenged estimates by the Wildlife Institute of India, an autonomous government body, of the suitability of Indian sanctuaries for the animal. Kuno Palpur, one of the recommended sites, was originally intended as a second home for the Asiatic lions in Gir, but which the Gujarat government has opposed despite a Supreme Court order directing the transfer.
In 2012, the Supreme Court stayed the Environment Ministry project to bring African cheetahs to Kuno.
In 2017, the National Tiger Conservation Authority revived the proposal and appealed to the Supreme Court to “clarify its order”. The Supreme Court in 2020 removed its bar on importing the cheetah and allowed it in on an experimental basis and this paved the way for the first batch of cheetahs.
About 10-12 cheetahs are expected to be brought into India every year and around 35 are believed to be necessary to create a sustainable population.
The success of this batch of animals will be the touchstone of India’s initiative to be home to four wildcats — the tiger, lion, leopard and cheetah.
