BHOPAL: Adding a new chapter to India’s ambitious Project Cheetah, nine cheetahs from Botswana were released into Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park (KNP) on Saturday.
Union Minister of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change, Bhupender Yadav, released six female and three male cheetahs into the national park.
Located in northern MP’s Sheopur district, KNP is the first home of African cheetahs under the central government’s ongoing project to reintroduce and multiply cheetahs in the country’s wild from where they had become extinct due to rampant hunting more than seven decades ago.
The nine cheetahs gifted by Botswana travelled from Botswana to Gwalior in the Indian Air Force’s C17 Globemaster large military transport aircraft from 81 squadron (the Skylords) on Saturday morning, and were later shifted in two IAF helicopters to their new home, KNP.
With the arrival of the nine cheetahs from Botswana, the African cheetahs' first and second home in India – MP’s Kuno National Park and Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary, respectively – now have a total of 48 adults and cubs. 45 of them are at KNP.
This is the third batch of cheetahs from any South African region’s nation that have been released at KNP under the Project Cheetah since September 17, 2022. Before this, the first batch of eight cheetahs from Namibia was released at the KNP by PM Narendra Modi on September 17, 2022 followed by 12 cheetahs from South Africa, which were released in the same national park in February 2023.
The nine cheetahs were released on Saturday into the designated quarantine bomas, where they will undergo mandatory health monitoring and acclimatization protocols for around a month as per established guidelines before their eventual release into the wild.
“This is the third successful inter-continental translocation of big cats since September 2022 to KNP in Madhya Pradesh. All stakeholders, including the Botswana government and our scientists and experts from the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and KNP, besides the MP government officials and local communities around KNP are to be congratulated for the success of the Project Cheetah under the guidance of PM Narendra Modi,” Union Minister Bhupender Yadav said.
“In May, we will be hosting in New Delhi, a major conference of the International Big Cat Alliance, which has 21 member nations. We’re holding the National Board for Wildlife meeting in Bhopal in the evening. Our biggest challenge now is to address the issue of man-wild animal conflict for which we’re going to work at policy intervention level as well as work with local communities,” Yadav told journalists.
