Kuno national park has enough prey base, no plan to relocate cheetahs, says union minister Bhupendra Yadav

Union Environment Minister Bhupendra Yadav on Thursday said that there was no plan to relocate cheetahs from Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh, as the sanctuary has enough prey base.

New Delhi: Union Environment Minister Bhupendra Yadav on Thursday said that the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh has "enough" prey base for the cheetahs and refuted all the claims that the government is looking to relocate them.

Briefing reporters on the nine-year achievements of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change at Indira Pariyavaran Bhavan in New Delhi, the Union Minister said, "Although the Gandhi Sagar wildlife sanctuary in northwestern Madhya Pradesh has been identified as an "alternative site" in case of any problem emerges at Kuno in the future, but there is no plan to shift the cheetahs anywhere else for now," said Yadav when being asked to reply on the recent deaths of cheetahs and their cubs in Kuno National Park.

He further said that as part of the much-talked 'Project Cheetah', "More cheetahs will come in the coming five years and we are in touch with the experts from South Africa and Namibia. These are the two countries from where cheetahs were brought to the country and more cheetahs were expected to arrive in the coming years."

He said the cheetahs are adapting to the weather and the habitat and establishing their territories and "we should give them time to do that". It is pertinent to note that Prime Minister Narendra Modi released the first batch of eight spotted cheetahs from Namibia into a quarantine enclosure at Kuno on September 17 last year.

In the second such translocation, 12 cheetahs were flown from South Africa and released into Kuno on February 18. Three adult cheetahs and three cubs died in the last three months, which raised a lot of questions and invited criticism from wildlife experts and opposition. Following the deaths of cheetahs, the Union government last month set up an 11-member high-level steering committee to review and monitor the progress of the Cheetah reintroduction programme.