CHEETAH PROJECT - ENVIRONMENT
News: 12
cheetahs from South Africa to arrive in India by February-end
What's in the news?
● India and South Africa
have finally signed a long-pending agreement to translocate 12 cheetahs to India.
Key takeaways:
● The
cheetahs will be transported to India by February-end and reintroduced at the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh,
where eight such cats were brought from Namibia in September last year under a
similar agreement.
● The
initial batch of cheetahs from South Africa will be followed by transport of
batches of 12 annually for the next “eight to 10 years”.
Recent agreement with Namibia:
● Eight cheetahs were flown
into the Kuno National Park (KNP), Madhya Pradesh, from Namibia on September 17
as part of an ambitious project to re-introduce the big cat into the country.
MoU between India and South Africa:
The
Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Reintroduction of Cheetah to India
consists of following aspects.
● Facilitates
cooperation between the parties to
establish a viable and secure cheetah population in India.
● Promotes conservation.
● Ensures
that expertise is shared and exchanged.
● Capacity building
to promote Cheetah conservation.
● Human-wildlife
conflict resolution.
● Capture
and translocation of wildlife and community participation in conservation in
the two countries.
● Collaborate
and exchange best practices in large
carnivore conservation through the transfer of technology, training of
professionals in management, policy, and science.
● To
establish a bilateral custodianship arrangement for cheetah translocated
between the two countries.
Cheetah:
● The
cheetah is one of the oldest of the big cat species.
● The
cheetah is also the world’s fastest land
mammal that lives in Africa and Asia.
IUCN STATUS:
● Asiatic cheetah -
Critically Endangered (CR)
● African Cheetah
- Vulnerable (VU)
India: Cheetah - extinct in India.
Reasons for the Extinction:
● Hunting
● Diminishing
habitat
● Non-availability
of enough prey - black buck, gazelle and hare - led to the extinction of the
cat in India (1952).
● The
advent of climate change and growing human populations have only made these
problems worse.
Go back to basics:
Reintroduction to India:
● Reintroduction
of a species means releasing it in an area where it is capable of surviving.
● Recently,
the Union Minister for Environment, Forests and Climate Change has launched the
‘Action Plan for Introduction of Cheetah
in India’ under which 50 of these big cats will be introduced in the next five
years.
● The
Ministry will also launch extensive awareness campaigns among the local
communities and villages, encouraging them to be stakeholders in the project.
● Kuno Palpur National Park
(KNP) in Madhya Pradesh is the first site to host these cheetahs.
○ They’ll be imported from
Namibia and South Africa.
● The
main goal of the Cheetah reintroduction project in India is to establish viable
cheetah metapopulation in India that allows the cheetah to perform its
functional role as a top predator and provides space for the expansion of the
cheetah within its historical range thereby contributing to its global
conservation efforts.
Facts about Kuno Palpur national park:
● Established
in 1981 as a wildlife sanctuary in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
● Flora
: Dry savanna grassland.
● Fauna
: Predators like Indian leopard, Indian wolf, Sloth beer, and Ungulates include
chital, Sambar deer, nilgai, four-horned antelope, chinkara, blackbuck.
● Most
of the inhabitants were Saharia tribal people.
● The
sanctuary derives its name from the Kuno,
a tributary of the river Chambal; this perennial river flows through the
middle, bisecting the sanctuary.