Namibian cheetahs coming to MP

Don’t book that ticket to Africa yet to see the fastest animal on Earth —the cheetah. It’s going to be coming from Namibia to Madhya Pradesh in the next one year.

Updated on: Jan 22, 2012, 01:27:39 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Don’t book that ticket to Africa yet to see the fastest animal on Earth —the cheetah. It’s going to be coming from Namibia to Madhya Pradesh in the next one year.

The environment and forests ministry is set to clear the import of the African cheetah to Kuno Palpur, 210 km from Gwalior, despite reservations from some wildlife experts.

India saw the last cheetah in the wild shot dead 64 years ago in Sarguja, Chhattisgarh.

In all, three locations — two in MP and one in Rajasthan — are to get 18 cheetahs. A team of experts from Namibia, including Lorrie Marker, a cheetah conservationist, approved the landscape spread nearly 345 square kilometre for India’s most ambitious species-introduction project.

“Re-introduction of the cheetah in wild can protect our neglected grasslands,” said a top ministry official, while rejecting opposition from experts such as the director-general of forest, PJ Dalip Kumar, who believes the project would be ecologically unviable.

Wildlife biologist Faiyaz Khudsar points out that there won’t be enough prey in the area to support a sizable cheetah population.

But Marker and other experts involved in the project believe there are adequate ecological factors to support the wild cats.

Cheetahs have been relocated within Africa but not outside the continent, leading to apprehension whether the animal would adjust to the new climate and habitat.

But a recent study has shown that about 30,000 to 70,000 years ago cheetahs from Africa migrated to Asia creating a sub species — the Asiatic cheetah — before their rapid decline in the last century.

Apprehensions of transporting the cats by air were put to rest by MK Ranjit Sinh, former MP forest secretary, who said that flying for a few hours will make no difference to the animal. Tiger conservationist Valmik Thapar said that the environment ministry should put India's wildlife system in order first, before introducing new species.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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