Folly upon Folly

IN JUNE THIS YEAR, President Droupadi Murmu visited Kuno National Park to see how the Narendra Modi government’s grand quest to introduce African cheetahs into its forests was faring. The picture, whichever way one looked at it, was dismal. In April, a five-month-old cub died in captivity from a spinal fracture. In May, a monitoring team found the partly-eaten carcasses of four one-month-old cheetah cubs, the first litter born in the wild under the project, near their den in the national park. On 1 June, a two-year-old female cheetah who had been released into the wild was found injured in Morena district and immediately shifted to a veterinary clinic, only to succumb to her injuries five days later. Senior officials told the media that the cubs had been likely attacked by leopards—independent experts hinted they were behind the Morena attack as well—even as the official press notes deferred the exact causes of death to pending postmortems. Of the 75 cheetahs introduced under the project, 23 are now dead, and only 19 are ranging free in the wild. One of the free-ranging cheetahs went “off radar” in August, after her satellite collar stopped showing up on the monitoring system at Kuno, and was located only after a twelve-day search. The rest sit in enclosures, four years after Modi released the first batch on his birthday, amid fanfare about bringing up a wild, self-sustaining population.

Last year, I reported in detail on the scientific and logistical failures underlying Project Cheetah. Wildlife and biodiversity experts, local activists, villagers and retired bureaucrats spoke to me with concern over the project’s sorely inadequate habitat, the government’s lack of accountability and sidelining of its own experts, and the project’s high cost to local communities, who are increasingly vulnerable to human–animal conflict. Since then, there has been more evidence of the project’s failures. In fact, during her visit, Murmu specifically inquired after the nine cheetahs that had come from Botswana at the end of February. The African country had symbolically handed over the cats during her official visit there last November. They had been quarantined upon arrival in the park, and four of the cheetahs had only gotten to prowl in purpose-built enclosures since then, sharing their fate with others imported from South Africa, in February 2023, and from Namibia, in September 2022.

Touted as the “reintroduction” of a cheetah subspecies that never naturally ranged in the subcontinent, Modi’s four-year-long vanity project continues to pile folly upon folly. The government continues to hold the cats captive in a habitat too small and ill-suited for them, despite clear evidence that it is imperilling the species, classified as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, while displacing forest-dependent communities and traditional pastoralists in Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. I had previously reported that the South African government was reconsidering further cheetah translocations—its memorandum of understanding with India, signed amid domestic controversy and opposition by South African conservation groups, had been accompanied by the South African government’s announcement of the translocation of one-hundred twenty cheetahs over an initial period of ten years in exchange for India providing material assistance and training in wildlife policing. Now, a new multi-year census of South Africa’s cheetah population has found that the country’s free-roaming population numbers merely 119 individuals—over seventy percent less than previously believed. South African wildlife experts are now pushing the IUCN to reclassify the species as “Endangered.” Even before the census was published, the South African government had suspended further transfers to India. “No final decision has yet been taken on the continuation of further translocations,” Nomxolisi Mashiyi, the acting chief director for communications and advocacy at the South African ministry of forestry, fisheries and environment, told me in April this year. Mashiyi added that the whole project is currently “under review” and that “assessments are being conducted on the outcomes of previous translocations, as well as on the readiness and capacity of both countries to support future movements.” I previously reported the Modi government had neglected to share quarterly progress reports with the South African government, a mandatory condition of the MoU.

Project Cheetah’s foundation is so shaky, and its global reputation so shot through with adverse reports about scientific mismanagement, political interference and lack of transparency, that the Modi government has struggled to procure more cheetahs over the last two years. Despite official efforts to shroud the status of Modi’s cheetahs in secrecy, paranoia and misdirection, the reports of their deaths, injuries and unscientific upkeep pile higher and higher. As the government’s shopping expedition for African cheetahs stretched out, an eager-to-please media ecosystem regularly churned out speculative reports that India might get cheetahs from Botswana or Kenya. Experts in both countries told me that neither has a surplus population that could be translocated elsewhere. Yet India somehow managed to procure wild-ranging cheetahs from Botswana—only to put more than half of them behind a fence.