Guwahati, March 29: One of the cheetahs that were translocated to India from Namibia has given birth to four cubs at the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh.
The cheetah named Siyaya who was among the first batch of eight cheetahs that were translocated to India on September 17 in 2022 gave birth to the four cubs.
Union Minister Bhupender Yadav, who also shared the pictures of the cubs on Twitter termed it as a momentous event in wildlife conservation. The minister further congratulated the entire team of Project Cheetah for their relentless efforts in bringing back cheetahs to India and for their efforts in correcting an ecological wrong done in the past.
Under the ambitious Cheetah reintroduction programme, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had released the first batch of eight spotted felines -- five females and three males -- from Namibia into a quarantine enclosure at Kuno in Madhya Pradesh on his 72nd birthday on September 17 last year.
One of the Namibian cheetahs, Sasha, had died due to a kidney-related ailment on Monday, forest and wildlife officials in Madhya Pradesh said.
In a second such translocation, 12 cheetahs were flown in from South Africa and released into Kuno on February 18.
Cheetah is the only large carnivore that got completely wiped out from India due to over-hunting and habitat loss. The last cheetah died in Koriya district of present-day Chhattisgarh in 1947 and the species was declared extinct in 1952.
The goal of Cheetah introduction project in India is to establish viable cheetah metapopulation in India that allows the cheetah to perform its functional role as a top predator and provide space for the expansion of the cheetah within its historic range thereby contributing to its global conservation efforts.