Cheetah reintroduction plan: Indian team in Namibia for discussions, say MP officials

A delegation from India, which includes Madhya Pradesh forest department personnel, has reached Namibia in southern Africa in connection with a plan to reintroduce the cheetah in the country in Kuno National Park, officials said on Saturday.

The cheetah, the world's fastest land animal, had gone extinct in India some 70 years ago and the plans to reintroduce the majestic big cat into the wild here again has been in the works for over a decade now, they added.

"The delegation includes officials of National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), Wildlife Institute of India (WII), the Government of India and Madhya Pradesh Forest Department. It left for Namibia on February 17 to discuss issues like relocation logistics etc. They are scheduled to return by February 25," Rajnish Singh, Deputy Conservator of Forest (DCF) with MP Principal Chief Conservator of Forest (Wildlife), told PTI.

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The plan is to introduce 50 cheetahs over the next five years, possibly 10 each year, with some 10-12 big cats being brought in from Namibia and South Africa as "founder stock" during the first year, officials explained.

The country's last cheetah died in 1947 in present day Korea district of Chhattisgarh, which was once part of MP. The cheetah was declared extinct from India in 1952.

The 'African Cheetah Introduction Project in India' was conceived in 2009 under the Congress-led UPA regime, with Jairam Ramesh as Union Environment and Forests Minister, but it failed to take off for over a decade.

The plan to introduce the cheetah by November last year in MP's Kuno, spread over 750 kilometres in the state's Chambal region, suffered a setback due to the Covid-19 pandemic, officials said.

The Kuno national park has good prey base for cheetahs, comprising the four-horned antelope, chinkara, neelgai, wild pig, spotted deer and sambhar, they added.

Experts from the premier Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India had visited sites in Madhya Pradesh in 2020 to look for the best habitat for the introduction of the African cheetah, the visit coming after the Supreme Court, in January that year, approved the plan to introduce cheetahs in a suitable habitat on an experimental basis, they added.

The SC had also set up a three-member committee to guide the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) on the cheetah introduction project, and the WII team visited Kuno National Park in Sheopur, Nauradehi sanctuary in Sagar and Gandhi Sagar sanctuary on the northern boundary of Mandsaur, these officials informed.

Officials said MP has been home to cheetahs in the past and it also has a successful animal translocation record, a reference to the reintroduction of tigers in Panna Reserve in 2009.

The cheetah is considered vulnerable under the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN) red list of threatened species, with a declining population of less than 7,000 found primarily in the African savannas.