MP govt fires top forest officer after several cheetah dies at Kuno.

BHOPAL: In what is being seen as a fallout of the deaths of five African cheetahs and three cubs at Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park (KNP) in less than four months, the state government shunted out the principal chief conservator of forests (PCCF-Wildlife) on Monday.

The development, which came three days after the latest death of semi-adult cheetah Suraj in the KNP’s open jungles, saw the 1987 batch Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer JS Chauhan being transferred from the post of PCCF-Wildlife at the state forest directorate to the post of PCCF-Production post at the directorate.

The present PCCF-Production Asim Srivastava (a 1988 batch IFS officer) will be the new PCCF-Wildlife at the state forest headquarters in Bhopal.

It was Chauhan who had reportedly written to the NTCA a few weeks back, calling for some cheetahs from the KNP to be shifted to an alternative site as it wasn’t capable of handling so many.

The official was shunted out just a few hours after the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) stated that as per preliminary analysis of post-mortem reports and diagnosis of mortality events, the deaths of the five adult cheetahs over the last four months happened due to natural causes and not due to other reasons such as poaching, poisoning, road hits, electrocution or radio collar related issues.

The NTCA also stated that consultations with international cheetah experts/veterinary doctors from South Africa and Namibia are being done on a regular basis to investigate the cheetah deaths.

Reacting to the NTCA statement, Congress MP and the party’s national general secretary in-charge (communications) Jairam Ramesh said, “Predictably the PM must have intervened and got the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) to issue this statement attributing all eight cheetah deaths so far at Kuno to ‘natural’ causes. The statement is clearly a political one, intended to whitewash management failures and mocks conservation science. There appears to be enough evidence to expose the NTCA statement.”

As many as five adult Namibian and South African cheetahs and three cheetah cubs (four cubs were born in March last week) have died at the KNP in less than four months, with the last one Suraj (a South African adult male) dying on July 14 in the open jungles of the national park in MP’s Sheopur district.