First India-born cheetah set to reach adulthood in Kuno National Park

One of the 16 cheetahs born in India will reach adulthood on Monday at Kuno National Park (KNP) in Madhya Pradesh, marking a hopeful turn for the three-year-old reintroduction efforts, an official said on Sunday.

"Mukhi, a female cub born to Namibian cheetah Jwala on March 29, 2023, will reach adulthood, as it will turn 915 days or 30 months old, on Monday, ready to contribute to increasing the cheetah population in India," Project Cheetah director Uttam Kumar Sharma told PTI.

"Of the four cubs Jwala delivered, three died due to extreme heat, but Mukhi survived and has grown well. Today our efforts have yielded encouraging results," he said.

On September 17, 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi released eight cheetahs brought from Namibia into a special enclosure at Kuno. It marked the world's first inter-continental relocation of a large wild carnivore species.

India subsequently imported 12 more cheetahs from South Africa in February 2023.

At present, India has 27 cheetahs, including 16 born in the country, with 24 in Kuno and three in the Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary, Sharma said.

He confirmed that 19 cheetahs, comprising nine imported adults and 10 cubs born in India, died of various causes since the project began, while a total of 26 cubs have been born in the KNP so far.

After three years of Project Cheetah, which saw 20 felines imported from Africa, India now has a gain of seven cheetahs compared to the initial number.

Officials associated with Project Cheetah have asserted that India's ambitious move to reintroduce cheetahs into its wild has been a "big success", and the programme has successfully navigated the initial challenges of the world's first transcontinental transfer of a large carnivore.

Since PM Modi released the first batch of eight cheetahs from Namibia into Kuno National Park on his birthday in September 2022, their numbers were reinforced in February 2023 by 12 cheetahs from South Africa, they have bred multiple times here — an evidence that they have adapted well to Indian conditions, sources said.

The overall cub survival rate in Kuno is over 61 per cent against the corresponding global figure of 40 per cent, they said.

India is in negotiation with some African countries for bringing in fresh batches of cheetahs and is expected to have one group of 8-10 of them, likely from Botswana by this December, as per the sources.

Other countries being looked at by India as a possible source of new batches of cheetahs include Namibia, which has supplied the wild animal earlier too, they said.