Course corrections should be par for the course in any project that aims to create a sustainable population of animals from scratch.
Two years after cheetahs were introduced in Kuno National Park, Madhya Pradesh, the country has at least 24 of the big cats. These striped animals were declared extinct from India in the early 1950s and the population in Kuno could herald the revival of the species in the country. These, however, are still early days for Project Cheetah. Many glitches will need to be ironed out and lessons of the past two years put to good use before the project can be called a success. Today, all the surviving African animals, introduced to kick-start the project, and their progeny, live in acclimatising enclosures. Cheetahs are free-ranging predators. The test of their survival is in the wild. Creating a self-sustaining population will require weaning away a significant number from protective care. Kuno’s last free-ranging cheetah, seven-year-old Pawan, reportedly drowned in mysterious circumstances in August — the eighth adult animal, brought from Africa, to die since the project commenced.
Questions about breeding the big cat in alien conditions have dogged Project Cheetah since its inception — India was home to Asiatic cheetahs, and not the African subspecies that were introduced in 2022. The criticism was amplified after Pawan’s death. A Special Investigation Team (SIT) constituted to probe the incident was disbanded in less than a day. The National Tiger Conservation Agency (NTCA), the project’s nodal body, has not yet given a convincing answer for this hasty decision. Experts have alleged that the episode testifies to the persistent lack of transparency around Project Cheetah. NTCA has also been called out for shifting goalposts in the past two years. Project Cheetah’s original goal, “to establish a free-ranging breeding population of cheetahs in and around Kuno”, for instance, has been diluted to “managing” a metapopulation through assisted dispersal.
Course corrections should be par for the course in any project that aims to create a sustainable population of animals from scratch. But the problems ailing Project Cheetah cannot always be termed as teething troubles. A large measure of these stems from the authorities not giving adequate respect to expert opinion. Last year, for instance, a report in this paper highlighted the NTCA’s reluctance to take on board the views of the South African and Namibian scientists behind the translocation. Studies have also revealed that the forest department is under-prepared to deal with the ways of the African animal. In the coming months, as Project Cheetah plans to move beyond Kuno to Gandhi Sagar Sanctuary, also in MP, the NTCA has its task cut out.
