Cheetah Reintroduction in India: Project Cheetah, Kuno National Park and the 2026 Count

Project Cheetah: India's Cheetah Reintroduction at Kuno

Founder Cheetahs from Namibia, South Africa and Botswana

On the launch day the Prime Minister released the first eight cheetahs, from Namibia, into enclosures at Kuno. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change runs the project through the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA). Bringing founders from southern Africa made it the world's first intercontinental translocation of a large carnivore.

Indian Air Force C‑17 Globemasters flew the first two batches more than 7,900 km. The agreement with South Africa is reviewed every five years and covers training and technology transfer as well as translocation. Drawing founders from several genetically diverse southern African populations strengthens the small founding group.

Cheetah Population in India in 2026: Births, Deaths and Dispersal

Breeding is the clearest sign that the project is working. In December 2025 India had 30 cheetahs: 11 founders and 19 born in India. A month earlier Mukhi, the first cub born on Indian soil, had given birth to five cubs, the first second-generation litter. Through 2026 the Environment Ministry announced a new count after each birth, death or arrival:

• February 2026: Aasha had five cubs and Gamini three, and on 28 February nine cheetahs from Botswana were released at Kuno. The count announced then was 48, of whom 28 were born in India. That is one India-born cheetah more than the earlier announcements add up to (38 before the release, 27 of them born in India), and the announcements do not explain the difference.
• March 2026: Jwala, a Namibian founder, had five cubs, the tenth litter on Indian soil, and the count rose to 53, of whom 33 were born in India.
• April 2026: An India-born daughter of Gamini had four cubs in the open forest, the first births outside the enclosures, and the count reached 57.
• May 2026: Those four cubs were found dead on 12 May, probably killed by a leopard.
• September 2026: The project turned four on 17 September, and a new litter announced the next day took the count to 56. On 21 September the Namibian male Gaurav died, which left 55 cheetahs in India, 51 of them at Kuno.

Young cheetahs have also begun to roam. In early 2026 two India-born cheetahs, KP2 and KP3, walked 60 to 70 km from Kuno into Baran district in Rajasthan. The NTCA called this natural territorial behaviour that the action plan anticipates; the animals are radio-collared and tracked round the clock by a joint team of the two States.

Why India Lost the Asiatic Cheetah and Turned to Africa

Asiatic Cheetah Extinction in India in 1952

The Asiatic cheetah once ranged from Punjab to Tirunelveli and from Gujarat and Rajasthan to Bengal, in scrub, dry grassland and savanna. The last confirmed wild cheetahs were three animals shot in 1947 in the sal forests of Koriya, now in Chhattisgarh, and in 1952 the cheetah was declared extinct in India.

• Why it vanished: Hunting, poaching and the use of cheetahs for coursing, together with habitat loss to farming, the decline of prey and the species' low rate of reproduction.
• Today: Cheetahs have vanished from 91 per cent of their former global range; about 50 Asiatic cheetahs survive, all in Iran.
• Status: The cheetah species is Vulnerable on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and is listed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Requests to Iran for Asiatic cheetahs, first made in the 1970s, failed, and the plan to source them from Iran was dropped in 2010. India therefore turned to the African cheetah, a different subspecies of the same species, which can fill the empty ecological role.

Today the cheetah is not naturally found in India; the animals at Kuno came from Africa. Many other animals are native. The black-necked crane breeds in Ladakh, the snow leopard lives high in the Himalaya, and the Indian giant flying squirrel is native to India's forests.

The two bodies behind the cheetah's status work differently. The IUCN, which compiles the Red List, is not an organ of the United Nations, although it holds observer status there, and it runs field projects around the world. CITES is legally binding on its Parties but does not take the place of national laws, so each country passes its own legislation to apply it.

Kuno National Park, the Lion Plan and the Supreme Court

Kuno National Park covers 748.76 sq km in Madhya Pradesh and became a national park in 2018. In the 1990s it was chosen for the Asiatic Lion Reintroduction Project, meant to give India a second lion population away from Gir; between 1998 and 2003 about 1,650 people from 24 villages, mostly Saharia tribal people, were resettled outside it. In April 2013 the Supreme Court ordered Gujarat to send some Gir lions to Kuno, but Gujarat has not carried out the order, and the prepared park later went to the cheetah.

The lion that Kuno was prepared for and the cheetah that came instead are different kinds of cat. The cheetah belongs to the Felinae, the subfamily of cats that can purr but cannot roar, whereas the lion and the leopard, which also lives at Kuno, belong to the Pantherinae, the roaring cats. Lions have no fixed breeding season, and male leopards, like male lions, mark their territory with scent.

The search for a cheetah site ran beside the lion plan and passed through the Supreme Court:

• 2009: A workshop at Gajnar in Rajasthan, in September, began the search for a cheetah site; Kuno, Nauradehi and Shahgarh were among the places studied.
• 2012: The Supreme Court halted the plan, treating it as an introduction rather than a reintroduction.
• January 2020: The Court reversed itself and allowed a small number of African cheetahs on a trial basis, which opened the way for Kuno.

How Cheetah Reintroduction Works: Soft Release, Tracking and Expansion

Soft Release, GPS Tracking and the Metapopulation Goal

A cheetah flown in from Africa is not set free at once. It goes through a soft release, moving in stages from a quarantine enclosure to a larger fenced acclimatisation camp, called a boma, and only then into the open park, following soft-release protocols used worldwide.

Monitoring follows the IUCN guidelines of 2013 on reintroductions. GPS collars, camera traps and 734 to 816 km of line transects track the cheetahs and their prey. The collars show how widely they range. The female Gamini and her four sub-adult cubs used about 6,160 sq km, and the male coalition Agni and Vayu about 1,819 sq km.

A single park cannot hold a lasting population, so the plan links several. A metapopulation is a set of separate groups of one species, connected by animals that move or are moved between them.

• Goal: 60 to 70 cheetahs across 17,000 sq km of the Kuno and Gandhi Sagar landscape by 2032, starting from Kuno National Park and a 3,200 sq km landscape around it.
• Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary: 368 sq km, with 2,500 sq km of potential habitat about 300 km from Kuno, in Mandsaur and Neemuch districts; three adult cheetahs lived there in February 2026.
• Veerangana Durgavati Tiger Reserve: On 7 October 2026 two cheetahs, Vyom and Neera, were released in this reserve in Sagar district, the third cheetah site; it was declared a tiger reserve in 2023.
• Banni Grasslands: The Wildlife Institute of India has identified this reserve in Kutch, Gujarat, as a possible reintroduction site.

The numbers behind the plan are modest. With about 5 per cent net growth a year, the population is expected to fill its carrying capacity in about 15 years. The first phase cost ₹39 crore, met within the centrally sponsored Project Tiger scheme.

Communities, Grasslands and Big Cat Diplomacy

Cheetah Mitras, Grasslands and the International Big Cat Alliance

The project depends on the people who live around Kuno. Over 450 Cheetah Mitras in 80 villages act as its local ambassadors, and it has created about 380 direct jobs, including 80 cheetah trackers and 200 patrol workers. Local communities receive a 5 per cent share of eco-tourism revenue.

The ecological case is about grasslands. The cheetah is used as a flagship and umbrella species, a well-known animal that draws attention and money, and whose protected habitat shelters many other species of the neglected grassland and semi-arid ecosystems, such as the great Indian bustard of the Thar desert.

Critics see symbolism in this. They argue that African cheetahs kept in enclosures, like tigers flown between reserves, put single species ahead of landscapes, while many grassland birds decline unnoticed.

Project Cheetah sits inside India's wider big-cat diplomacy. The Prime Minister launched the International Big Cat Alliance (IBCA) on 9 April 2023, at the event marking 50 years of Project Tiger, for the seven big cats, which are the tiger, lion, leopard, snow leopard, cheetah, jaguar and puma.

• Base and money: It is headquartered in India, with ₹150 crore of budgetary support for five years, up to 2027‑28.
• Members: In May 2026 it had 24 member countries and three observers; Saudi Arabia had confirmed its membership, while China was not expected to join.
• First summit: Planned for New Delhi from 1 to 3 June 2026, alongside the fourth India-Africa Forum Summit, it was postponed in May 2026 because of the Ebola outbreak in parts of Africa; new dates were to be announced after consultations.

Biodiversity of India and the Biological Diversity Act, 2002

How India's Biodiversity Varies and the Biological Diversity Act

India is one of the 17 megadiverse countries and holds four of the world's 36 biodiversity hotspots, namely the Western Ghats, the Himalaya, the Indo-Burma region and the Nicobar Islands. Its ecosystems run from high Himalayan cold desert to evergreen forest, desert, coasts and mangroves.

India is divided into 10 biogeographic zones, namely the Trans-Himalaya, the Himalaya, the desert, the semi-arid zone, the Western Ghats, the Deccan plateau, the Gangetic plain, the North-East, the coasts and the islands. The cheetah belongs to the semi-arid grasslands and scrub, which have drawn far less protection than forests.

Biodiversity hotspots are regions with very high species richness and a high degree of endemism, species found nowhere else. Conservation that protects a whole ecosystem, as when the entire forest is saved to save the tiger, is in situ (on site) conservation; national parks, sanctuaries and biosphere reserves are its legal tools. Ex situ (off site) conservation, as in zoos and seed banks, is used when a species faces a very high risk of extinction in the wild. Project Cheetah returns a species to its habitat, so it is in situ conservation.

The Biological Diversity Act, 2002, provides for the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from biological resources and knowledge. It works through three tiers of bodies. The National Biodiversity Authority, set up at Chennai in 2003, acts at the national level, State Biodiversity Boards in the States, and Biodiversity Management Committees in local bodies.

Parliament amended the Act in 2023 to promote research on medicinal plants, encourage plant-based medicines, benefit local people who use forest produce and simplify compliance for domestic companies.