Project Cheetah

Story hook

On 17 September 2022 — Prime Minister Modi's 72nd birthday — a Boeing 747 freighter painted with the cheetah motif touched down at Gwalior Air Force Station. Inside were eight Namibian cheetahs (5 females, 3 males), tranquillised, in air-conditioned crates. From Gwalior they flew by Indian Air Force Chinook helicopter to Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh. Cameras rolled as Modi released the first two cats — Freddie and Alton — from their quarantine enclosure into the soft-release boma. The cheetah, declared extinct in India in 1952, was back after 70 years.

Six months later, 12 more cheetahs from South Africa joined them. By 2023, two cubs had been born on Indian soil. But the project's honeymoon ended quickly. By September 2023, eight adult cheetahs had died — some of dehydration, some of mating injuries, some of unknown cardiac complications during the winter coat moult. By 2024 the death toll stood at 9 adults + 3 cubs, while 14 cubs had been born in Kuno.

This file is about that experiment: why India brought back a species lost for seven decades, why the African cheetah is biologically not the Asiatic cheetah, what Kuno is and isn't, and what the project's stuttering start tells us about reintroduction ecology.

Why this matters for UPSC

Project Cheetah is the world's first intercontinental large-carnivore reintroduction and the second-most-asked wildlife project in UPSC after Project Tiger. Prelims has already asked about the source countries (Namibia, South Africa), the chosen site (Kuno), and the subspecies involved. Mains questions in 2024 explicitly cited Project Cheetah on species-recovery ethics. Interview boards routinely probe candidates from Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan.