By Nneka Nwogwugwu
India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav, who launched an ‘Action Plan for Introduction of Cheetah in India’ on January 5 at the 19th meeting of the National Tiger Conservation Authority has confimed that the country will import the first batch of African cheetahs to the Kuno-Palpur National Park in Madhya Pradesh.
According to the action plan, “bringing back” the cheetah to India will help conserve the currently-neglected grassland habitats in the country.
The action plan also stated that 50 of these big cats will be introduced in the next five years.
Experts, however, are not convinced at all that this will help conserve grassland habitats, which are still officially designated ‘wastelands’ in India.
India’s savannah grasslands were once home to the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus). But hunters brought down the last wild cheetahs in 1947, although there remained some “credible reports” of the species from the Indian subcontinent up to the 1990s, researchers wrote in 2019.
According to another report, the Indian government mooted the first plans to reintroduce cheetahs to India in the 1970s. The action plan says the environment ministry engaged the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, in 2009 to survey potential reintroduction sites.
“Project Cheetah aims to bring back the only extinct large mammal in independent India – the cheetah,” Yadav writes in the plan document, a 300-page book. “The project is not only about the charismatic cheetah in itself, but more for its role to restore the balance within ecosystems it inhabited” (sic).
India aims to do this by introducing African cheetahs – a different subspecies, Acinonyx jubatus jubatus – to the grassland habitats that the Asiatic cheetahs occupied in the past.