Second cheetah site in Madhya Pradesh to be ready by November

India’s second cheetah site at Gandhisagar wildlife sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh may become ready by November with experts insisting that the Union government must continue with cheetah import to establish a stable population.

At a high-level review meeting held at Bhopal on Friday, officials informed Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan that Gandhisagar could be ready by around November while work had begun on Nauradehi wildlife sanctuary for housing the felines at a later date.

Officials said six cheetahs were released in the wild of Kuno national park and three more would be released before the monsoon. They were among the 20 African cheetahs brought from Namibia and South Africa to introduce cheetahs in India. Three animals died.

Chauhan asked officials to prepare a timeline for readying Gandhisagar (≈ 2,500 sq km) and Nauradehi (≈ 1,197 sq km) wildlife parks and get them approved by the new Project Cheetah Steering Committee, official sources said.

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The death of 3 cubs on May 23 though unfortunate, is unlikely to affect India’s cheetah reintroduction programme with experts noting that New Delhi should continue to import cheetahs at least for five years as originally planned.

“In order to establish a stable population, more cheetahs will have to be imported, but there is no rush to do that at this stage. Other reserves still have to be prepared before more cheetahs can be imported and we still have to see how the current cheetahs settle in,” Adrian Tordiffe from the University of Pretoria and one of the advisors to the Indian programme told DH.

The South African expert also said heatwaves alone might not be the reason for the demise of three cubs on a single day.

“Some wild cheetah cubs die during periods of extreme heat, but very often in such cases, there are other factors that are also playing a role. Within the South African metapopulation cheetahs, cub deaths due to environmental conditions are not common,” he said.

Officials said poor nutrition along with heatwave-like conditions were to be blamed for the deaths of three of the four cubs born to Jwala, a hand-reared cheetah that came from Namibia. Each of the diseased cub’s body weight was just about 1.6 kg instead of the normal body weight of 3 kg. The health of the surviving cub has improved, but it is under watch.

Meanwhile, the Union government has formed a new 11-member Cheetah Project Steering Committee under the chairmanship of Rajesh Gopal, former director of Project Tiger, to review the cheetah programme. The panel will also decide when Kuno would be thrown open to the public.