BHOPAL, October 15 — The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) on Thursday formally accorded final clearance for the introduction of African cheetahs into Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh under Phase-II of 'Project Cheetah'.
The sanctuary, sprawling across Mandsaur and Neemuch districts along the Chambal River valley, has operationalized a fortified 64-square-kilometre predator-proof soft-release enclosure. State wildlife authorities have completed extensive prey-base augmentation, translocating spotted deer (chital), blackbuck, and sambar to support the incoming cohort from Kuno National Park and prospective overseas reserves.
Ecologists and wildlife biologists emphasized that establishing a distributed metapopulation beyond Kuno buffers the reintroduced apex carnivore against localized epizootic disease outbreaks, territorial overcrowding, and genetic bottlenecks, while restoring the dry deciduous thorn scrub ecosystem of the Chambal basin.
The intercontinental translocation parameters of Project Cheetah (operationalized in September 2022 following the official 1952 extinction declaration of the Asiatic cheetah), the IUCN red-list status of Acinonyx jubatus, the geographic contours of Gandhi Sagar Dam and Chambal River basin, and NTCA mandates represent high-yield topics in UPSC Civil Services (GS-III: Biodiversity & Wildlife Management).