Aathira Perinchery 
Bengaluru: September 17, is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday. It also marks the second anniversary of Project Cheetah, India’s ambitious African cheetah introduction programme that aims to reintroduce cheetahs to select grassland habitats in central India. Two years ago on this day, and to much fanfare, Prime Minister Modi released the first batch of African cheetahs from Namibia into their quarantine enclosures in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park. In February 2023, 12 more adult African cheetahs came in from South Africa.
However, India’s Project Cheetah has faced multiple challenges over these 700-odd days .Four litters of cheetah cubs were born on Indian soil during this time. But they were all born in captivity (in enclosures), and five of the 17 cubs have died due to several reasons including heat stress. One may argue that science shows that cheetah cubs don’t really have great survival rates. But eight of the 20 adults that came in from Namibia and South Africa have also died. While authorities have claimed that all deaths were due to “natural causes”, experts have differed in their opinions. Though many adults were set free in the wild in Kuno for up to a few months in 2023, they had to all be recaptured and put back into fenced enclosures to monitor their health conditions because at least three succumbed to what experts have termed septicaemia, a fatal blood infection. Pavan, the only wild-roaming adult cheetah that was later re-released in the wild in Kuno died – very curiously – due to ‘drowning’, as recently as August 27 this year.
Currently, all surviving adult cheetahs and cubs are in fenced enclosures inside Kuno National Park. Authorities have said that they will soon release both the adults and cubs in the wild in mid August this year, but experts told The Wire that they will believe it only when it happens. The latest in the series of challenges to the project also includes an audit report by the Madhya Pradesh government that points to “a lack of coordination” between central and state government departments, as per several recent news reports published over the last few days.
Two years of Project Cheetah
On September 17, Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav took to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to celebrate two years of Project Cheetah.
“Two years ago, we embarked on a historic journey to reintroduce cheetahs in India after nearly 70 years. The project, envisioned by PM Shri @narendramodi ji, a pioneering effort globally, symbolises hope for successfully restoring lost wildlife populations and ecosystems….Today, as the world watches these cheetah cubs thrive in their natural habitat, we celebrate not just their survival but the resilience and dedication of all involved in these humongous efforts. This is just the beginning of restoring balance to our ecosystems. Many more milestones lie ahead!,” he wrote.
Project Cheetah aims to reintroduce cheetahs into select grassland habitats in central India, to ‘bring back’ the species that once roamed many of these areas in the country. The argument for this mammoth exercise – which involves a lot of expertise, effort and money – is that bringing cheetahs back to India will help save India’s arid ecosystems, including grasslands, which are currently ailing due to several threats including encroachment and habitat conversion to other land uses.
However, because the project aims to bring in African cheetahs to India, it cannot exactly be called a ‘reintroduction’: it is, more fittingly, an ‘introduction’. That’s because India was home to Asiatic cheetahs, an entirely different subspecies. Asiatic cheetahs are smaller, and genetically different enough to have been called a different subspecies. The only remaining population of Asiatic cheetahs now dwells in the deserts of Iran. And this population too, is dwindling: possibly only less than 30 individuals remain, making it impossible to use them in any reintroduction exercise.
So India turned to Africa. The first batch of adult African cheetahs – 3 males and 5 females – arrived from Namibia on Modi’s birthday in 2022. A second batch of 12 – 7 males and 5 females – arrived a few months later, in February 2023. All the animals arrived at Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh, and were first quarantined before being released in the wild at a later stage.
However, unlike what Union environment minister Yadav said in his post today on X, Project Cheetah wasn’t really “envisioned” by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, though it was indeed during his time in office that it was implemented. While Yadav launched an ‘Action Plan for Introduction of Cheetah in India’ on January 5, 2022, at the 19th meeting of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (which now oversees the implementation of Project Cheetah), the idea to bring cheetahs from Africa to India was first mooted in the 1970s, but talks with Iran later fell through. The idea resurfaced again in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2010, when Indian National Congress’s Jairam Ramesh was Union environment minister, he visited South Africa to discuss bringing cheetahs to India with the government.
But even before the implementation of Project Cheetah in September 2022, several Indian and international ecologists and conservationists told The Wire that several issues surround the introduction of African cheetahs in India. And not surprisingly, Project Cheetah has met with numerous challenges – just like they said it would. To be fair, Union environment minister Yadav did allude to the challenges in his post:
“It hasn’t been an easy road. Numerous challenges, from habitat adjustments to ensuring the cubs’ survival in the wild, were overcome,” he wrote in the same post on X today (September 17, 2024).
But were they really overcome? Experts have differed on this over the two years of the Project’s implementation. Here is a list of the main events that Project Cheetah has witnessed so far, including challenges, and their latest updates.
Cheetah births…and deaths
A total of 17 cubs have been born on Indian soil during the course of Project Cheetah so far. Namibian-born Jwala first gave birth to a litter of four in March 2023, and also birthed a litter of four in January this year. A few weeks before Jwala’s second litter, Aasha – another female from Namibia – had also given birth to three cubs. And in March this year, Gamini, a female from South Africa, gave birth to six cubs.
However, five of these 17 cubs have died in their enclosures so far due to various reasons. Three of the four cubs from Jwala’s first litter in March last year died due to “heat stress and dehydration”, as per a reply given by the Union environment ministry in parliament. The sole remaining cub from Jwala’s first litter is currently being hand-raised in Kuno. An RTI activist alleged a few months ago that this cub had suffered a foot fracture in November last year, and that authorities had treated it in secret. Officials, however, have denied the allegations. A cub born to Gamini was found dead in its enclosure in June this year; another cub from the same litter also died in August this year after a spinal fracture, according to authorities.
Also read: Information Blackout on Cheetahs’ Health and Status Hurts Them, Some Experts Say Not in Loop
Scientific evidence suggests that the survival rate of cheetah cubs is low – as the Union environment ministry also pointed out in a press note circulated after the first cheetah cub died in May last year. The note said that according to experts and available literature, the survival rate of cubs in open forests is only 10% and that under natural circumstances, only 1 in 10 cheetah cubs attain adulthood. However, one must note that none of the cubs born on Indian soil were technically wild-born: they were born within the confines of their mothers’ enclosures, where they still continue to remain.
What is more of a concern is the death of eight adult cheetahs over the last two years of the project. And experts have raised numerous questions about the circumstances of many of these deaths.
In March 2023, Sasha, a female from Namibia, died due to chronic kidney failure. The next month, Uday, a male from South Africa, died due to cardiopulmonary failure, according to authorities. A female named Daksha was the third adult cheetah to die. The incident occurred in May 2023, when two males tried to mate with Daksha inside an enclosure. Experts raised questions about the need to rush into breeding measures, less than a year into the arrival of the animals from Africa.
Then, in July 2023, male cheetahs Tejas and Suraj died due to wounds on their necks and backs; Tejas was in an enclosure when it died, and authorities claimed that it could not recover from the wounds derived from a violent fight with a female cheetah. However, Suraj’s death raised suspicions and cheetah experts, including Adrian Tordiffe, a wildlife veterinarian who was then part of the panel of international cheetah experts to be consulted in Project Cheetah, told The Wire that both Tejas and Suraj’s deaths were due to septicaemia, a fatal blood infection brought on by the wounds that could have been caused by ill-fitting radio collars. The animals had maggot-infested wounds per reports. Tordiffe also added that Suraj’s death was “potentially avoidable” and that authorities lost “a full day” in taking action while waiting for the post-mortem report of Tejas, the first cheetah to die of a neck wound three days earlier.
A few days later, on August 2, authorities found Dhatri, a female from Namibia, dead in the wild. Though the forest department did not mention the cause of death but a post-mortem later would confirm what a series of social media posts by Africa-based Cheetah Conservation Fund, which had also aided in bringing cheetahs from South Africa to India, suggested – that Dhatri too had died due to an infection caused by maggots.
The government’s reaction through all this, however, has been to insist that all these deaths occurred due to “natural causes”. S.P Yadav, Additional Director General of Forests at the environment ministry, later said that one of the major challenges faced in the first year of managing cheetahs in India was the “unexpected development” of winter coats in some cheetahs during the Indian summer and monsoon, in anticipation of the African winter (June to September). He went on to add that in their “next cheetah import”, they would be “very careful in animal selection”, selecting animals that either do not develop winter coats or develop thinner ones.
Also read: Project Cheetah: Radio Collar Infections a ‘Cause for Concern’, Team Expert Questions Ground Support
On January 16 this year, Shaurya, a male from Namibia, died inside its enclosure despite being treated for a “weakness”. It was the seventh adult to die in Kuno. Seven months later, Pavan, the only cheetah to still roam the wild in Kuno, also died. Authorities found its carcass near a stream, with half of its body inside the water. Again, scientists have questioned how a big cat that is comfortable in water can drown in a swollen ‘nala’ or stream, as the press note provided by the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department claimed.
Captivity, releases and recaptures
Over the 700-odd days they’ve spent in India, the African cheetahs that have come in from Namibia and South Africa have been quarantined, released, re-captured, kept in captivity for a few months, released and re-captured again. With doubts regarding whether the animals’ radio collars may have played a role in their fatal maggot-ridden wounds on their backs and necks, authorities recaptured all free-roaming cheetahs last June and kept them under observation in their fenced enclosures.
Some haven’t been released since then and have been in captivity for months together. Others (such as Pavan) were released, but tranquilised and recaptured multiple times because they strayed too far from Kuno’s boundaries and into human habitation or cropland, and brought back to their enclosures. For instance, Pavan once strayed around 300 km away from Kuno, and close to the Madhya Pradesh-Uttar Pradesh border; another time, he was brought back from the border that Madhya Pradesh shares with Rajasthan. Experts have pointed out that cheetahs are delicate cats: tranquilising them multiple times can have detrimental impacts on their health.
Cheetah in the Kuno National Park. Photo: Twitter/@KunoNationalPrk.
With the death of Pavan in August this year, all surviving cheetahs are captive and held in fenced enclosures in the park. A few days before Pavan was found dead, the Cheetah Project Steering Committee announced that authorities would soon release all cheetahs and cubs in the wild in Kuno. The release, the announcement said, would occur in a phased manner once the monsoon retreats from the area.
However, the big cats have spent way too much time in captivity, experts told The Wire. This is a concern because too much time in enclosures can decrease the fitness of the animals – which are a species that ranges across very long distances. Their captivity in enclosures can even affect their ability to adapt to Indian habitats, they have said; the animals have also been supplemented with buffalo meat apart from officials releasing live chital or spotted deer in the cheetahs’ enclosures. One expert also pointed out that if the animals have been given anti-parasitic drugs during their time in the fenced enclosures, they may not have been able to build up natural immunity to deal with parasitic infections, as The Wire reported on August 24.
Science not “robust”, debates abound
Numerous ecologists ,including scientists who have studied African cheetahs in the African continent, have raised questions regarding the science that has gone into the planning and implementation of Project Cheetah.
In October 2022, scientists who have studied large carnivores around the world – including African and Asiatic cheetahs in the wild – called Project Cheetah an “ill-advised” and “ecologically unsound” project. In their letter published in the scientific journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, they said that the Indian government’s current ‘action plan’, which is Project Cheetah’s implementation template, doesn’t incorporate new research on cheetah home ranges and densities. It thus overestimates the carrying capacity of Kuno National Park, they said.
Indian officials estimated in the action plan that the park can hold 21 cheetahs, but as per the scientists’ calculations – that took into account latest data on home range sizes and more – Kuno could be home to only three cheetahs. Statistical ecologist Arjun Gopalaswamy had told The Wire Science that the need for a large range could encourage the cheetahs to move out of Kuno and into villages surrounding the park. This happened on multiple occasions over the past two years.
Another letter in April 2023, by cheetah experts including Bettina Wachter of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, Germany, noted that the introduction of African cheetahs to India “was planned without considering their spatial ecology”: cheetahs just need more space, based on how their communication and territorial behaviours work.
However, experts including Tordiffe and scientists Y.V. Jhala (a scientist with the Wildlife Institute of India, WII, who was associated with Project Cheetah until the government did not renew his extension) and Qamar Qureshi (WII, and currently associated with the Project) responded to this in June this year in another letter, claiming that Wachter’s letter was merely extrapolation from their observations in Africa and that it may not be applicable in the Indian context because ecological interactions between and within species are “complex and often site-specific”.
Egos, political rivalry and more
The secrecy, political rivalry and egos of the people involved were huge challenges when he worked with Project Cheetah, wildlife veterinarian Tordiffe told The Wire in a detailed interview earlier this year.
“The high-profile nature of the project has created a situation where certain people stand to gain significant political points with those in power,” he had told The Wire in this interview. “The biggest challenge at the moment, in my opinion, is that management decisions there seem to be based on politics rather than science,” he added in response to yet another question.
Tordiffe, who told The Wire that he is not associated with Project Cheetah anymore – because he has not received any communication from the Indian government since July last year – also pointed out that the flow of information was “tightly controlled and it is difficult to know what to believe”.
“Science cannot advance in a society where information is controlled by those in power. If scientists are silenced, conspiracy theories are allowed to thrive and people and animals end up suffering unnecessarily. The truth is the truth, even if it is difficult to face; authorities just do not want to acknowledge that they do not have all the answers,” he had told The Wire.
Following the deaths of three adults in monsoon 2023, authorities also issued a gag order on officials associated with Project Cheetah, preventing them from talking to the media on anything related to the programme.
In an interview yesterday to the Times of India, another international expert, Vincent van der Merwe, who is also on the panel of international experts for Project Cheetah, said that Indian bureaucrats being shifted from one post to another on a regular basis was “unsettling” because of several reasons including that “replacement bureaucrats are often unaware of their responsibilities and commitments to maintaining the relationship with South African bureaucrats”, and that “knowledge and understanding of wild cheetah management is lost and needs to be reestablished”. He also noted that they observed “levels of hostility and professional jealousy towards highly talented Indian conservationists” which he said was “extremely destructive to the project”.
Latest stumble: Audit report flags incongruencies
A report by the accountant general of Madhya Pradesh has raised concerns over the management of Project Cheetah in Kuno National Park, “highlighting a ‘lack of coordination’ between central and state government departments”, news agency PTI reported. It also said that even though cheetahs from Africa came into Kuno, the park’s management plan for 2020-2030 has no mention of cheetah reintroduction at all. Per the news report, the audit report noted that the expenditure of Rs 44.14 crore incurred on Project Cheetah from 2021-22 to 2023-24 (till January 2024) “was not in accordance with the approved management plan”. It also noted that “there are no documents detailing where the cheetah reintroduction work began and how it started”, per the Indian Express.
However, the PTI news report also quoted Uttam Sharma, chief conservator of forests and director of the Lion Project as saying that this was a “routine exercise which is conducted in several phases” and that any action, “if required”, would “be taken after the completion of the entire process”.
Per the audit report, former divisional forest officer (DFO) of Kuno, Prakash Kumar Verma, was sent to South Africa and Namibia for training in cheetah management. However, he was soon transferred out of Kuno “just a few days after the training”. This made his “training unusable for cheetah reintroduction, and the expenditure on it futile,” the news report quoted the audit report as saying.
Will the cheetahs really help India’s arid ecosystems?
Apart from the above-mentioned challenges, there is the long-standing question of whether introducing African cheetahs in India will really help the ecosystems they are introduced into in any way.
One of the aims of Project Cheetah, as listed in the Cheetah Action Plan, is to use the African cheetahs as a flagship species to protect India’s grasslands, which are highly threatened. Flagship species are those whose conservation can help conserve other, even unrelated, species and sometimes even the entire animal community or ecosystem.
Union environment minister Yadav also referred to the role of cheetahs in saving ecosystems in his post yesterday, saying that the Project “symbolises hope for successfully restoring lost wildlife populations and ecosystems”.
“This is just the beginning of restoring balance to our ecosystems,” Yadav wrote as he celebrated two years of Project Cheetah on X.
However, this is something that ecologists have raised concerns about even before the implementation of Project Cheetah. Abi Tamim Vanak, a senior fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Ecology and the Environment, Bengaluru, had told The Wire Science in January 2022 that the government still classifies such habitats, called open natural ecosystems (ONEs), as ‘wastelands’ and that there’s no policy to manage these ecosystems. This status quo remains, despite the arrival of the cheetah in India.
So the question is: are cheetahs really performing their role as a flagship species? More importantly, are they a flagship species in this context at all, when India’s ONEs are already home to charismatic fauna and better flagship species such as the Great Indian bustard (a large grassland-dwelling bird, whose numbers are steadily declining in India), the caracal (a wild cat), and the Indian wolf?
Noting that the African cheetahs ‘imported’ into India are still captive and not roaming free, conservationist and former member of the National Wild Life Board Prerna Singh Bindra wrote on X on yesterday, that “the cheetah introduction is poorly planned, unscientific [sic] and a costly mistake that #India & its #endangered native #wildlife can ill-afford”. In her written debate on DarkNLight against the need for introducing African cheetahs in India, she wrote: “Driven more by political grandstanding than conservation imperatives, the cheetah introduction is a costly mistake that the country and its endangered native wildlife can ill-afford. As the project falters, India stands to lose its credibility on a project that has the world watching.”