NEW DELHI: India plans to bring another batch of eight cheetahs from Botswana by the third week of December. The selected cheetahs are currently under quarantine in Botswana.
Union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Bhupendra Yadav announced that the Government of India has formally struck a deal with the southern African country. The cheetahs will be quarantined for 2-3 months at Kuno-Palpur National Park in Madhya Pradesh before their formal release into the forest.
Meanwhile, experts have criticised the government’s decision to import more cheetahs from southern Africa.
A senior officer at the National Tiger Conservation Authority expressed concern, saying, “It seems the government has not learned a crucial lesson from past experiences. Many cheetahs died after being brought from Namibia and South Africa because experts failed to anticipate the impact of different climatic conditions between the two continents on the cheetahs.”
Cheetahs transferred from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere, or vice versa, experience disruptions in their biological clocks, which are adapted to their respective climates.
Project Cheetah is an initiative by the Indian government to reintroduce the cheetah to its historical range in India, where it went extinct in 1952. It is the world’s first intercontinental large wild carnivore translocation project, involving the relocation of cheetahs from countries like Namibia and South Africa to protected areas, primarily Kuno National Park, to help re-establish the species and restore the grassland ecosystem.
Currently, India has 27 cheetahs, including 16 that were born in the country. Of these, 24 are located in Kuno National Park, while three are in the newly established Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi released eight cheetahs brought from Namibia into a special enclosure in Kuno on September 17, 2022. In February 2023, India imported 12 more cheetahs from South Africa.
So far, nine adult imported cheetahs and ten cubs born in India have died, with a total of 26 cubs born in the country. As a result, there has been a net gain of seven cheetahs in India. Yadav described the Cheetah Project as a “big success.”
