More than half of India’s cheetahs remain confined within fenced enclosures nearly four years into a project meant to restore wild populations, prompting some scientists to question the government’s claims that the cheetah introduction project is succeeding.
India’s cheetah population has climbed to 53 after the arrival of nine animals from Botswana last week and the birth of five new cubs at Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh, the Union environment ministry said on Monday.
Environment minister Bhupender Yadav, who released six female and three male cheetahs from Botswana into quarantine enclosures in Kuno on February 28, called the introduction programme “a great success”.
He described the latest litter — the 10th since cheetahs first arrived in September 2022 — as a “moment of great pride”, reflecting the work of veterinarians, field staff and others involved in the project.
Indian officials say the project aims to establish a sustainable population of free-ranging cheetahs, decades after the species was declared locally extinct in 1952.
But only 15 cheetahs or their cubs are currently roaming freely outside fenced enclosures, a project official said, requesting anonymity. Thirteen are in Kuno and two are at the nearby Gandhi Sagar National Park, another potential site for cheetahs.
The continued confinement of most of the animals, along with repeated recaptures of cheetahs that have wandered near human settlements, has led some scientists to question whether the project resembles a genuine reintroduction effort.
“At this point, we have near-zero evidence for self-sustaining populations in the wild,” said Ravi Chellam, a large cat specialist and coordinator with the Biodiversity Collaborative, a network of conservation researchers.
“The emphasis appears to have shifted to captive breeding — and to managing the narrative around the project,” he told The Telegraph. “Which is probably why we see the hype with every new litter. The project’s overwhelming focus on captive breeding has resulted in the neglect of its stated goals, including the conservation of India’s open natural systems.”
The project brought eight cheetahs from Namibia in 2022 and 12 from South Africa in 2023, before the nine animals arrived from Botswana last month.
Project planners said in 2022 that Kuno’s 748sqkm offered abundant prey and could hold 21 free-ranging cheetahs.
But some wildlife biologists familiar with cheetah ecology have long disputed that claim, citing research from free-ranging cheetahs in Africa suggesting that, at best, cheetahs reach a maximum density of about one cheetah per 100sqkm.
Kuno forest authorities have also recaptured several cheetahs released into the wild after they were found approaching human settlements. The project’s 2023-24 report documents at least four such recaptures from December 2023 through July 2024.
Questions sent by this newspaper to the environment ministry and the National Tiger Conservation Authority, which is implementing the project, asking for the total number of such recaptures since then, the current number of free-ranging cheetahs, and supplemental food provided to the cheetahs, have not received a response.
“The cheetahs, when allowed to roam free, disperse widely and well beyond the boundaries of Kuno — this is expected and natural,” said Arjun Gopalaswamy, a statistical ecologist and chief scientist with Carnassials Global, a research firm that has advised conservation efforts in Africa and Asia.
“We cannot consider cheetahs to be free-ranging if they are repeatedly being caught and returned to Kuno,” he said.
Critics have also questioned how much time the animals and their cubs have actually spent roaming in the unfenced wild compared with the time they have spent confined within fenced enclosures.
Scientists guiding the project, however, assert that the effort has made measurable progress through what they describe as adaptive management strategies, despite challenges that have included the premature deaths of some cheetahs and cubs.
Amid the criticism about the prolonged confinement of the animals, project officials say the programme does not follow a “simplistic catch-transport-release” approach.
The enclosures are “fenced natural habitats within the larger Kuno landscape, allowing the cheetahs to hunt independently and exhibit natural behaviour while acclimatising to their new environment”, project veterinarian Sanath Muliya and his colleagues wrote in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science: Animal Conservation last year.
“This soft-release model … has also been shown to increase the odds of reintroduction success 2.5-fold,” they wrote, adding that the project is focused on improving the survival chances of the first-generation India-born cubs.
But critics say the effort falls short of a genuine reintroduction. “In a successful introduction, we should see cheetahs free-ranging in the open wild permanently, not being recaptured every time they approach human settlements,” Gopalaswamy said. “And we should see India-born cubs themselves surviving into adulthood in the wild.”
The project’s 2023-24 report said the fenced enclosures are “regularly supplemented” with chital deer, while the Madhya Pradesh government has told the Assembly that it spends about ₹35,000 per day to provide goat meat to the cheetahs.
Critics say the feeding blurs the line between captive breeding and true reintroduction, where predators are expected to hunt and survive on their own.