New Delhi: Seven more cheetahs, including two females, will be released into the wild in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park, as per a report by PTI. The newly-constituted Cheetah Project Steering Committee took the decision on May 31, in its first meeting after it was constituted on May 26. Before this, however, the Committee is likely to conduct a landscape-wise survey of Kuno to identify ‘sensitive’ locations, as per a news report.Three cheetahs will continue to remain in Kuno’s acclimatisation camps and won’t be released into the wild immediately. This is because the animals are from Namibia’s “captive stock” and it will take time to “rewild” them, PTI quoted the chairman of the Committee as saying.“Project on track”Since September last year, a total of 20 cheetahs have been brought in from Namibia and South Africa to India for Project Cheetah, a programme through which India aims to introduce African cheetahs into the wild in select habitats in central India. Three individuals died in March and April, and of the 17 remaining adult cheetahs, eight were released into the wild (including three on May 20 and one on May 28, as per a news report). Earlier in April, a male had ventured outside the Park and was captured and brought back to an enclosure. So currently, there are seven cheetahs in the wild in Kuno.Seven more cheetahs will be released in the wild in Kuno by the third week of June, PTI quoted the chairman of the high-level committee, Rajesh Gopal, as saying.“The project is on track and there’s no cause for worry. We have decided to release seven more cheetahs, including two females, by the third week of June,” Gopal, who is currently the secretary general of the Global Tiger Forum, told PTI.“Of the 10 cheetahs still in the larger fenced acclimatisation camps, seven will be released. The three remaining ones are from Namibia’s captive stock and more time is needed to rewild them,” he said.The decisions were taken by the Cheetah Project Steering Committee on May 31, in its first meeting held after it was constituted on May 26 by the National Tiger Conservation Authority.On May 8, the NTCA had said that it would release five more cheetahs (apart from the three already in the wild then) before the onset of the monsoon. (It was after this that three were released in the wild in Kuno on May 20, and one on May 28.) The remaining ten would be released in alternate sites including Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh, the union environment ministry had then said in a statement.Landscape surveyGopal, the Chairman of the Committee, told The Free Press Journal that all aspects of the Cheetah Project were discussed at the first meeting and that a landscape survey would be undertaken before the cheetahs are released so as to identify “sensitive” locations within Kuno. The survey would be conducted using remote sensing techniques and villagers would also be roped in for the survey, Free Press quoted him as saying. The Committee has also decided to form a Community Group of select villagers to help the field teams by informing them if cheetahs move into nearby villages.No fencingGopal also said India will not be fencing cheetah habitats, PTI reported. “It’s absolutely bogus to think of fencing the habitats. It goes against the basic tenets of wildlife conservation. What happened in a fenced park there (in Africa) will not happen here. Our understanding is that regional networks of protected areas should merge into a national network of protected areas so that there is porosity for wildlife gene flow,” he said.”We have our own socio-cultural issues. We have been handling tigers for the last 50 years and we know what the human-wildlife interface is. We can handle cheetahs too,” he added.
