Ready for cheetah challenge?

Experts says rehabilitation into wild, not relocation is the bigger issue. By January next, Bikaner in Rajasthan may get four African cheetahs from Namibia, the country with maximum big cats in the world, 58 years after India lost its last Asiatic cheetah.

Updated on: Jul 9, 2009, 01:09:48 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

By January next, Bikaner in Rajasthan may get four African cheetahs from Namibia, the country with maximum big cats in the world, 58 years after India lost its last Asiatic cheetah.

But, revival of cheetah population in the dry grasslands of Rajasthan, where tigers went missing from Sariska in 2004, has raised questions over the possibility of their captive breeding. “It’s a difficult task but not impossible,” said Dr Raghu Chandawat, a wildlife expert, who has worked on tiger relocation and conservation for years.

“Captive breeding of cheetahs is not as easy as it is for tigers, lions or leopards (other members of the big cat family)”.

But, M.K. Ranjitsinh, who was with the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department when India’s last cheetah was hunted down, is confident that the population of the world’s fastest animal can be revived in India.

He heads a Noida-based NGO, Wildlife Trust of India, which has got in-principle approval of the environment ministry for import of cheetahs, at least four, in the first go. “We have done a preliminary survey and found that cheetahs can be imported, bred in captivity and rehabilitated in wild,” he said.

The NGO proposal has got the support of the global wildlife watchdog, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which has listed cheetah as endangered species.

The proposal was submitted to the ministry a fortnight ago. “The final yes would be made after a team of Indian and foreign experts approves the rehabilitation plan in September,” said a senior official, who didn’t wish to be named as he’s not authorised to speak to the media.

Relocating them to India from Africa is not a problem, as they adapt very fast, Ranjitsinh and Chandawat said. Cheetahs have survived from Siberia to Africa.

But, their rehabilitation into wild is an issue. They like to live in vast tracks of land unlike tigers, whose area is not more than eight to 10 kms. “They need large grasslands up to 700 kms to survive,” Chandawat said.

If their enclosure is small, there is a danger of cheetahs killing each other. “Upgradation of conservation of the wild areas to meet requirements of the cheetahs would need a lot of planning,” said Ranjitsinh.

In September meeting, the scientific community will thrash-out all such issues. “We want to generate a lot of scientific thought before relocating the animals,” said Ashok Kumar, vice-chairman of WTI.

Another danger of captive breeding is DNA degeneration, a probable cause for decline of Asiatic cheetahs and poor reproduction because cheetahs have 90 per cent lower sperm count than tigers, say experts.

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

Check India news real-time updates, latest news on Hindustan Times and more across India.