New Delhi: Officials from South Africa visited the Kuno National Park and the Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh months after their country indicated it would only send more cheetahs to India for its Project Cheetah after conducting a review, the Hindustan Times reported.

Meanwhile, a team of officials from Botswana, from where the Union environment minister has reportedly said India will receive more cheetahs for the project, were also scheduled to visit Kuno ‘soon’, the newspaper reported on November 8.

According to its report, the South African officials visited Kuno over two days and then visited the Gandhi Sagar sanctuary on Friday, per a senior forest officer in the Madhya Pradesh government.

“Final” discussions over the transfer of a second batch of cheetahs to India were scheduled to take place over the weekend at the Union environment ministry, the officer was further quoted as saying.

Project Cheetah is an ambitious yet controversial translocation project that the Indian government kicked off in 2022. The aim is to populate some of central India's grassland-savanna habitats with African cheetahs in place of their Asiatic counterparts that once thrived in such habitats across the country before going extinct by the 1950s, mainly due to hunting.

So far, India has translocated 20 adult cheetahs from Namibia and South Africa. Nine of these animals, however, died due to several reasons including bacterial infections and mating injuries.

HT had reported in July that when a delegation of Indian officials visited South Africa to discuss new cheetah transfers, their hosts brought up “inadequate communication” between their two governments, the deaths of cheetahs in India due to extreme weather as well as their prolonged captivity.

It had cited a spokesperson for South Africa's forestry, fisheries and environment department as saying that a minister would visit India and review the condition of each translocated cheetah before deciding on future transfers.

That decision would be made ‘on a scientific assessment of whether the translocation will negatively impact the survival of the species in the wild, whether they would survive in their new home, and a population viability analysis used to predict the likelihood that a species will avoid extinction over a specific period’, HT had cited spokesperson Thobile Zulu-Molobi as saying.

However, following the South African team's visit last week the newspaper cited officials in India as saying that the transfer of cheetahs between the two countries ‘is likely to resume’ in December.

The members of the team “closely saw cheetahs in enclosures as well as in the wild. They praised the efforts of the [Union] and state governments in making the project successful,” it quoted Madhya Pradesh's principal chief conservator of forests Subhranjan Sen as claiming.

The team, per HT, comprised the forestry, fisheries and environment department's head of office and cabinet liaison Anthony Mitchell; chairperson of the ministerial task team on voluntary exit options and pathways from the captive lion industry Kam Chetty, biologist Sam Ferreira, scientist Brent Coverdale as well as senior scientist Jeanetta Cellier

Team from Botswana to visit ‘soon’

A team from the southern African nation of Botswana too is scheduled to visit Kuno “soon”, per HT. “The schedule of arrival of the cheetahs will be released by the end of this week. Our preparations are complete. The cheetahs will be kept in quarantine and then in enclosures before being released into the wild,” it quoted Kuno's chief conservator of forests Uttam Kumar Sharma as saying.

Earlier this month, the state-run Akashvani News cited Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav as saying that eight cheetahs from Botswana were set to reach India in December and be quarantined in Kuno.

However, according to the New Indian Express, a senior official at the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) that implements Project Cheetah raised concerns about the move.

“It seems the government has not learned a crucial lesson from past experiences. Many cheetahs died after being brought from Namibia and South Africa because experts failed to anticipate the impact of different climatic conditions between the two continents on the cheetahs,” the paper quoted them as saying.

Some experts – including government officials such as S.P. Yadav, who was member secretary in the NTCA – have said that the cheetahs from Namibia and South Africa developed thicker coats in the humid and wet monsoon of India, which is when their home countries experience winter. This caused localised skin infections followed by fatal bacterial infections, he had said.

The Ministry of External Affairs also announced that President Droupadi Murmu during her scheduled visit to Botswana – to where she is set to travel from Angola – is to discuss the translocation of cheetahs to India.

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