Project Cheetah population rises to 53 cats

India's cheetah reintroduction programme now reports 33 India-born cubs and is opening fresh habitats beyond Kuno.

What happened

• A high-level review of Project Cheetah was chaired by the Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Bhupender Yadav.
• The programme's total count now stands at 53 cheetahs, of which 33 are India-born — a sign the founder animals are breeding and surviving on Indian soil.
• The founder stock was 20 cheetahs brought from Namibia and South Africa, later supplemented by 9 from Botswana.
• Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh remains the primary site; Gandhisagar Wildlife Sanctuary (MP) has been readied as a second home.
• Preparatory work is underway to extend the range to the Banni grasslands in Gujarat and Nauradehi Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh.
• The review reaffirmed a landscape-based metapopulation strategy across central India, with continued sourcing of animals from African range countries to widen the gene pool.
• The first International Big Cat Alliance (IBCA) Summit 2026 was flagged as only weeks away.

Background & context

The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is the only large carnivore that India is recorded to have lost in historical times: it was declared extinct in India in 1952. The last documented animals were shot in the late 1940s in what is now Chhattisgarh. The animal reintroduced under the programme is the African cheetah — a deliberate point, because India's historical population was the Asiatic cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus venaticus), which today survives only as a tiny relict population in Iran. With the Asiatic sub-species effectively unavailable for sourcing, the programme uses the African cheetah as the closest viable surrogate to restore the ecological role of an open-country coursing predator.

Project Cheetah is administered by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), working with the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in Dehradun and the forest departments of the host States. It is best understood as India's first attempt at an inter-continental translocation of a large carnivore — moving a top predator from one continent to re-establish it on another, rather than the more usual practice of moving animals within the same country. The first cohort of eight Namibian cheetahs was released into Kuno in September 2022, followed by a South African batch in early 2023; the Botswana animals followed later to broaden genetic diversity.

The programme sits inside India's wider species-recovery tradition. The country already runs Project Tiger (1973) and Project Elephant (1992), and species-specific recovery programmes for the Asiatic lion, the one-horned rhinoceros, the great Indian bustard and the gangetic dolphin, among others. Project Cheetah is distinct from all of these in one crucial respect — it is not the conservation of a surviving population but the reintroduction of a species that had vanished entirely. That is also why its early years drew scrutiny: a reintroduction of this kind is judged not by how many animals arrive but by whether they breed, disperse and establish a self-sustaining wild population over a decade-scale horizon.

A point worth fixing for clarity, because it is a frequent source of confusion, is the difference between the two cheetah sub-species. The Asiatic cheetah once ranged across India's grasslands and is the animal of Mughal-era hunting records — Emperor Akbar is said to have kept large numbers of trained coursing cheetahs. Centuries of hunting, the loss of grassland prey and habitat conversion drove it to extinction here. The African cheetah now being released is a closely related but separate sub-species; it was chosen because the Asiatic animal exists today only as a critically endangered relict in Iran and cannot be sourced in viable numbers. The scientific rationale is that the African cheetah can fill the same ecological niche — a fast, diurnal predator of small antelope on open ground — even though it is not the exact animal India lost.

The choice of Kuno as the launch site was itself the product of long planning. Kuno had originally been prepared years earlier as a possible second home for the Asiatic lion (currently confined to Gujarat's Gir landscape), and so already carried a relocated-village history, a recovering prey base and a protected-area management structure. When the cheetah plan matured, Kuno's open and lightly wooded terrain, its prey of chital, sambar, nilgai and four-horned antelope, and its existing protection made it the readiest site in the country. Kuno was upgraded from a wildlife sanctuary to a National Park ahead of the cheetahs' arrival.

For Prelims

• Entity: Project Cheetah — India's programme to reintroduce the cheetah, the species declared extinct in the country in 1952.
• Species reintroduced: the African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) — NOT the Asiatic cheetah, which India had historically and which now survives only in Iran.
• Founder population: 20 cheetahs from Namibia and South Africa, plus 9 from Botswana.
• Current count: 53 cheetahs, of which 33 are India-born.
• Primary site: Kuno National Park, Madhya Pradesh (on the Kuno river, in the Sheopur–Morena landscape).
• Second site: Gandhisagar Wildlife Sanctuary (MP). Planned sites: Banni grasslands (Gujarat — a famed seasonal grassland of Kachchh) and Nauradehi Wildlife Sanctuary (MP).
• Administering chain: MoEFCC → NTCA → Wildlife Institute of India (WII) + State forest departments. The metapopulation approach means managing several separate sub-populations as one connected unit, with managed movement of animals between them.
• IUCN Red List status of the cheetah: Vulnerable globally (the Asiatic sub-species is Critically Endangered). The cheetah is the fastest land animal.
• Related body — International Big Cat Alliance (IBCA): an India-led grouping launched to conserve the world's seven big cats (tiger, lion, leopard, snow leopard, jaguar, puma and cheetah), headquartered in India; its first Summit is due in 2026.
• What it is NOT: Project Cheetah is NOT a translocation of the Asiatic cheetah (those are extinct in India and survive only in Iran); it is NOT run by a State government alone (it is an MoEFCC/NTCA programme); Kuno is a National Park, NOT a Tiger Reserve; and it is NOT part of Project Tiger — it is a separate species-recovery programme.

Why it matters

A reintroduction succeeds only when the moved animals reproduce in the wild and the population becomes self-sustaining. The headline figure — 33 of the 53 cheetahs now born in India — is the first hard evidence that the founder animals are breeding and that cubs are surviving in Indian conditions. That shifts the programme from a high-risk transplant towards a population with a future of its own.

Ecologically, the cheetah is an open-country, grassland and scrub predator. Its return is meant to do more than restore one species: it is a lever to protect India's grasslands and savanna ecosystems, which are among the country's most neglected and rapidly shrinking habitats, often mis-classified as "wasteland" and lost to plantation, cultivation or infrastructure. Conserving habitat for an apex predator forces the protection of the whole grassland food web beneath it — prey species such as blackbuck and chinkara, the grasslands themselves, and other threatened open-country fauna like the great Indian bustard. In this sense the cheetah functions as a flagship and umbrella species for an ecosystem that no existing flagship — tiger, elephant or rhino — represents.

The programme also illustrates a hard governance problem the project itself acknowledges. A single concentrated population is fragile: disease, inbreeding or a localised shock can wipe it out. The move to a metapopulation spread across Kuno, Gandhisagar, Banni and Nauradehi, combined with continued sourcing of fresh animals from Africa for genetic diversity, is the technical answer to that fragility. The frank admission that more habitats and more genetic inflow are needed is itself the kind of problem-and-response that makes the programme useful as an exam example.

The new sites each carry a distinct conservation logic. Gandhisagar Wildlife Sanctuary, on the Madhya Pradesh–Rajasthan border along the Chambal, extends the central-India range westward. The Banni grasslands of Kachchh in Gujarat are one of Asia's largest tracts of arid grassland and represent exactly the open, savanna-type habitat in which cheetahs evolved to hunt — bringing the programme closer to the species' natural setting than the wooded Kuno landscape. Nauradehi, a large sanctuary in central Madhya Pradesh, offers the space a dispersing, wide-ranging predator needs. Linking these sites into one managed network is the practical meaning of the metapopulation approach: animals are managed as a single connected population even though they live in separate protected areas.

Finally, the programme has a diplomatic dimension that the review explicitly connected to it. The International Big Cat Alliance is an India-led initiative to pool conservation effort, finance and expertise across the world's big cats, and its first Summit is due in 2026. Cheetah conservation depends on continued cooperation with African range states for sourcing and expertise, so the IBCA gives India both a platform to lead and a mechanism to sustain those partnerships. Read together, Project Cheetah is at once a species-recovery effort, a grassland-restoration lever and an instrument of India's environmental diplomacy.

For Mains

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