12 Cheetahs from South Africa take off for Kuno National Park (MP)

New Delhi/Gwalior: Twelve cheetahs from South Africa will arrive in Madhya Pradesh today, months after eight big cats had been ferried from Namibia.

The cheetahs will be released into their quarantine enclosures at the Kuno National Park by Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav.

An aircraft carrying the cheetahs will land at the Gwalior Air Force base at 10 am. They will then be taken to Kuno National Park in helicopters.

For the first time in history, South Africa will be translocating 12 cheetahs to India as part of an initiative to expand the cheetah meta-population & to reintroduce the mammals in the country.#SACheetahstoIndiapic.twitter.com/HvKpEHUDBa

— Environmentza (@environmentza)

10 quarantine enclosures have been created at the reserve for the big cats, officials said.

Last year in September, eight cheetahs from Namibia were flown in to India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had released the big cats to Kuno National Park on his birthday – September 17.

The eight Namibian cheetahs are now in hunting enclosures – a six square km-area where they can interact with each other – before being released into the wild.

The relocation of 12 cheetahs from South Africa comes three years after the idea was mooted by the Centre- the world’s first intercontinental translocation project that aims at reintroducing the big cats in the country.

The last cheetah died in India in Koriya district in present-day Chhattisgarh in 1947, and the species was declared extinct from the country in 1952.

Efforts to reintroduce the animals gathered pace in 2020 when the Supreme Court ruled that African cheetahs, a different subspecies, could be brought into the country at a “carefully chosen location” on an experimental basis.

A majority of the world’s 7,000 cheetahs live in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. Namibia has the world’s largest population of cheetahs.

According to the project, around 12-14 big cats that are ideal for establishing a new cheetah population would be imported from South Africa, Namibia and other African countries as a founder stock for five years initially and then as required by the programme.