'No greater gift...': CM Chouhan as plane with 8 cheetahs lands in Gwalior

Cheetahs - that went extinct in India in 1952 - set foot in India after 70 years.

A cargo flight - carrying eight cheetahs from Namibia - landed on Saturday morning in Madhya Pradesh as the state’s Kuno Palpur National Park (KNP) geared itself for the arrival of the big cats. As the country celebrates Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 74th birthday, he would set free the big cats into the wild at the national park at around 10:45 AM, an official statement said.

The eight cheetahs are en route India in a Boeing 747-400 aircraft from Namibia’s capital Windhoek. (Cheetah Conservation Fund)

“No greater gift for Madhya Pradesh than the fact that the cheetahs from Namibia are coming to Kuno National Park. They had gone extinct & it's a historic step to reintroduce them. This is the biggest wildlife incident of this century. This will rapidly boost tourism in Madhya Pradesh,” chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was quoted as saying by news agency ANII.

Visuals showed the Boeing 747-400 aircraft - that took off from Namibia’s capital Windhoek on Friday evening - landing at the Indian Air Force Station in Gwalior after a nearly 11-hour long journey.

Cheetah was declared extinct from India in 1952, and the release of the eight speedy cats in the Kuno National Park “is part of his efforts to revitalise and diversify India’s wildlife and its habitat,” read a statement from his office on Friday. This comes a day after PM Modi had a day full of engagements in Uzbekistan at the Shanghai Cooperation Summit.

Of the eight cheetahs, five are female between 2 and 5 years of age and three are males between 4.5 and 5.5 years of age.

Last minute preparations were made at the national park on Friday by forest officials as they checked arrangements, released animals in the wild for the big cats to feed on and inspected the enclosures, HT elaborated in a report.

The Cheetahs have been brought from Namibia under an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) signed earlier this year. “The introduction of Cheetah in India is being done under Project Cheetah, which is world’s first inter-continental large wild carnivore translocation project,” the government has underlined.

(With inputs from ANI)