The world’s fastest land animal, the cheetah, which became extinct in India 70 years ago, may return to the country as wildlife experts have said the species’ protected areas have been restored and the Supreme Court has given the goahead for a Cheetah resettlement plan. The move to bring back Cheetahs was articulated at the recent Conference of Parties to the Convention on Conservation of Migratory Species and Wild Animals held in Gandhinagar.
The apex court, which had in 2013 struck down the big cat’s rehabilitation plan calling it arbitrary and illegal, in January this year gave its nod to a plan that envisages bringing the animals from Namibia and resettling them in Indian reserves. There have been mixed reactions from conservationists to this ambitious project, some of whom feel it is a case of misplaced priorities.
They fear that the cheetah project may take away the focus from other species on the verge of extinction such as the great Indian Bustard, Bengal florican, wild buffalo, dugong and the Manipur browantlered deer. The project to relocate Asiatic lions from the Gir forests in Gujarat to Kuno in Madhya Pradesh, which has been several decades in the making, is nowhere near completion.
A scheme to relocate tigers from Madhya Pradesh to Odisha, the first inter-state tiger relocation programme, had to be called off after a tiger died and another one attacked humans. The Cheetah was declared extinct from India in 1952 and if it is reintroduced, India will be the only country in Asia to have all the major big cats in the wild, including lions, tigers and leopards. There are only 7,000 Cheetahs left in the wild globally and any move to translocate them from Africa to India has to be done with great caution as it would have very significant conservation ramifications.
The Centre and state governments have not shown much alacrity in translocating the Asiatic lions, which are found in the wild only in Gujarat, and there is serious concern that an infection or natural calamity can wipe out the last surviving population of the big cats. According to the 2015 Census, there are about 523 lions in Gujarat and over 200 lions died in 2017 and 2018 because of a mystery disease.
Despite the Supreme Court directing their translocation, there has been an inordinate delay in shifting the Gir lions from Gujarat to neighbouring Madhya Pradesh. Political grandstanding and bureaucratic red-tape appear to have stalled the project to move the lions and there is little hope that it will be done in the near future. Under these circumstances, the Cheetah project, which involves bringing the cats from distant Namibia and resettling them in forests in central India, is another enterprise that will take years to unfold.