Project Cheetah (Kuno National Park)

Project Cheetah is the Government of India's flagship species-reintroduction programme, formally launched on 17 September 2022, to re-establish a free-ranging cheetah population in the country after the species was declared extinct in India in 1952. The legal and institutional architecture rests on the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, under which translocation and reintroduction are sanctioned, and on the supervisory authority of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), which the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change designated as the implementing agency. The Wildlife Institute of India (WII), Dehradun, prepared the "Action Plan for Introduction of Cheetah in India" (2021), which set the technical parameters. The programme's lineage runs through a contested judicial history: the Supreme Court of India in 2013 (in the Centre for Environmental Law, WWF-I v. Union of India matter) initially blocked the import of African cheetahs as the proposed founder stock, before permitting an experimental introduction in an order of January 2020.

The procedural mechanics begin with site selection. Of several surveyed sites, Kuno National Park in the Sheopur district of Madhya Pradesh—elevated from sanctuary to national park status—was chosen for its grassland-savanna mosaic, prey base of chital and other ungulates, and the absence of resident tigers or leopards in densities that would preclude establishment. Founder animals are sourced through bilateral instruments: a Memorandum of Understanding signed with Namibia in July 2022 and a subsequent agreement with the Republic of South Africa concluded in January 2023. Translocated animals undergo veterinary screening, are flown in on dedicated aircraft, and are first released into fenced quarantine bomas (enclosures) for acclimatisation, then into larger soft-release enclosures, before final release into the open park. Radio collars enable continuous monitoring by a dedicated cheetah-tracking team.

The phased release model is central to the design. The first cohort of eight Namibian cheetahs—five females and three males—arrived on the programme's launch date in September 2022, with twelve South African cheetahs following in February 2023. The Action Plan envisages an annual augmentation of roughly twelve to fourteen animals over an initial five-year window to build a viable founder population of around forty to fifty individuals, with the long-term objective of a self-sustaining metapopulation distributed across multiple sites. Births in the wild are a key benchmark: the first litter on Indian soil since extinction was recorded at Kuno in March 2023. Anticipating density constraints, the government identified Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh as a second home, and discussions extended to sites in other states.

Named institutional actors give the programme its operational texture. The Cheetah Project Steering Committee, reconstituted in 2023 and chaired by a former Director of WII, advises the NTCA; the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department manages on-the-ground operations at Kuno. Internationally, the Cheetah Conservation Fund headed by Laurie Marker in Namibia, and South African wildlife veterinarians and ecologists including Adrian Tordiffe and Vincent van der Merwe of the Metapopulation Initiative, provided the founder animals and technical expertise. The launch on 17 September 2022 coincided with the birthday of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lending the project high political salience and sustained media attention from New Delhi.

Project Cheetah must be distinguished from adjacent conservation instruments. It is a reintroduction of an extirpated species using a non-native subspecies—the African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus jubatus)—as a proxy for the locally extinct Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus), the latter surviving only in Iran in critically low numbers. This contrasts with Project Tiger (1973) and Project Elephant (1992), which conserve extant resident populations rather than restore extinct ones. It also differs from translocation programmes that move animals within a species' existing range, such as Indian lion or rhino relocations, because Project Cheetah is an intercontinental introduction—the first such transfer of a large carnivore across continents for the purpose of re-establishment.

The programme has generated significant scientific controversy and operational setbacks. By 2023 several adult cheetahs and cubs had died from causes including septicaemia linked to dermatitis under radio collars during the monsoon, kidney failure, and intraspecific aggression, prompting debate over whether African savanna animals were suited to the Indian monsoon climate and whether Kuno's roughly 748-square-kilometre core was large enough for free-ranging cheetahs that require vast home ranges. Critics, including some of the original Supreme Court-appointed experts, argued the founder stock should have been the Asiatic subspecies and questioned prey density and human-habitation pressures. Proponents countered that mortality in the establishment phase falls within projected ranges. The space constraint sharpened plans to develop Gandhi Sagar and additional sites as the population grows.

For the working practitioner—UPSC aspirants preparing General Studies Paper III, environmental policy analysts, and conservation diplomats—Project Cheetah is a case study at the intersection of biodiversity restoration, international wildlife agreements, and the IUCN's reintroduction guidelines. It illustrates how the Wildlife (Protection) Act, judicial oversight, and bilateral MoUs interact in a single initiative, and it raises enduring questions of rewilding ethics, carrying capacity, and the use of proxy subspecies. Its outcomes will inform India's broader commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity and shape future debates over restoring lost megafauna across the subcontinent.