India's plan to reintroduce Cheetah follows success in other such projects

Country increased its Tiger population and other conservation efforts helped the Indian antelope and the gaur

By signing an agreement with the visiting Namibian Deputy Prime Minister in Delhi, India inches closer to reintroduce around three Cheetahs in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park before Independence Day. Cheetah, the world’s fastest animal, is the only large carnivore that has gone extinct in the country. It is widely believed that the Maharaja Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo of Korea, Madhya Pradesh, killed the last three recorded Cheetahs in India in 1947. The government declared the animal extinct in 1952.

A 10-square-km enclosure has been readied in the national park to house six Cheetahs. Under the project it is expected that around 50 Cheetahs will be introduced in the wild over the next five years. “It seeks to promote conservation and restoration of cheetah in their former range from which the species went extinct,” said Union Minister of Environment and Forests Bhupender Yadav on Twitter after a ceremony where an agreement called ‘South Africa-Madhya Pradesh Cheetah translocation project’ was on Wednesday with the Namibian leader.

Cheetahs in the subcontinent

Divyabhanusinh Chavda, a wildlife conservationist and author of 'The End of a trail: The cheetah in India', says that “the earliest historical references of cheetahs in the subcontinent are in classical Greek records of India from the geographer Strabo, about 200 years before the Common Era”. The name “cheetah” comes from the Sanskrit word chitraka which means “spotted”. Cheetah coursing, i.e. breeding and training the animal for hunting, was a common practice in the Mughal times. Emperor Akbar and Jahangir are said to have housed thousands of cheetahs for this purpose.

It was under the British that Cheetahs suffered irreversible loss of both their habitat and population due to the clearing of large forest areas for plantations and their hunting for trophies. Environmental historian Mahesh Rangarajan argues that the administrative policies of the British like bounty hunting of cheetah and considering them as ‘vermin’ played a “major role in its (cheetah) extermination in India”.

Earlier in 1970s, India tried reintroducing Asiatic cheetahs from Iran. However, there was a regime change in Iran following the 1979 Iranian revolution and the deal could not take place. The current plan to reintroduce Cheetah dates back to 2009, after a feasibility study conducted by the Union Environment Ministry and the Wildlife Trust of India found Kunho as the most suitable for the reintroduction. But the plan soon ran into hurdles as the Supreme Court (SC) stayed the order to reintroduce the cheetah in Kunho because the National Board for Wildlife had not been privy to the matter. The court said that priority should be given to the reintroduction of the Asiatic lion, which is only found in Gir National Park in Gujrat.

In January 2020, the SC approved Cheetah’s reintroduction after a government plea. The project was hit again by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the same year. It was only after the dissipation of third wave of Covid-19 that the project was expedited. According to officials, plans for the Cheetah translocation to Kunho are in compliance with the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s guidelines, with focus on the forest site quality and prey density. The plan has received all the requisite certifications from the CITES, a multilateral treaty to protect endangered plants and animals, as well.

What reintroducing Cheetah means

Reintroduction refers to the attempt to re-establish a wild population of a species in a location where it used to occur. It is a form of “conservation translocation,” which also includes reinforcement of existing populations, or attempts to establish a species outside its indigenous range for conservation purposes. Reintroductions have been conducted for more than 100 years, but their scope and frequency have increased greatly in recent decades.

India has had a successful history of reintroduction and translocation. Project Tiger has been one of the biggest successes in the conservation efforts in India. The country reported around 2,900 tigers in 2018, which is double the number in 2006. India has also witnessed several successful reintroduction projects headed by wildlife enthusiasts. One example is the Bisalpur Rewilding Project in 2018. Helmed by royal Shweta Rathore, the project brought back over 150 of the endangered Indian antelope, apart from several other species of fauna and flora in and around the Jodhpur area. Similarly, in February 2011. an African-based safari company was at the forefront of the translocation of 19 gaur (Indian bison) at Bandhavgarh National Park in Madhya Pradesh. Over a decade, the gaur herd numbered more than 70.

There have been numerous successful reintroduction projects across the globe. Golden lion tamarins in Brazil were thought as extinct until the 1970s, when 200 were discovered in the Atlantic coastal forest of Brazil. Due to a successful conservation effort, the monkey has now been reintroduced to 17 forest fragments and 1200 or more now live in the wild. Similarly, due to excessive hunting and slaughter for the fur trade, the American Bison population came down to as few as 750 animals in the 1890s. Through conservation initiatives, re-introduction and population management the population has rebounded to around 350,000. Similarly, the reintroduction of grey wolves at Yellowstone over 21 years ago, helped successfully reverse the degraded ecosystem at the American national park.

Despite the encouragement received by these remarkable stories of success, the reintroduction of Cheetah to India still faces challenges. One of them is that the African Cheetah will face is that of coexistence. Kunho National Park is already home to lions and leopards. Hence the plan “to introduce cheetahs from Africa is poorly conceived as it ignores the fact that the spotted cat requires large areas to sustain itself. And in habitats already densely populated by humans and livestock, there is a chance of their elimination due to conflicts”, says Ullas Karanth, wildlife biologist and director, Centre for Wildlife Studies.

Genetic considerations also feature as one of the main challenges that species being introduced in new areas face. Reintroduced populations experience increased vulnerability to influences of drift, selection, and gene flow evolutionary processes due to their small sizes, and climatic and ecological differences between source and native habitats. “In Maharashtra, a rewilded tigress was released [March 2021] but was killed by the local tigress. If the rewilded cat had been released in an area with lots of prey and no resident tigress, it would have survived. But that can’t be done as the goal of rewilding is to augment the population, and so a tiger or tigress should be released only in a place where there are others,” says AJT Johnsingh, wildlife biologist and author.

Despite these challenges, only a few weeks remain before we could see the big cat prancing in the Indian wild. Wildlife enthusiasts and nature lovers are both excited and hopeful to have a glimpse of the majestic big cat.