Twelve cheetahs- including seven males and five females from South Africa– have begun their journey to India- and are set to arrive in India on Saturday, environment minister Bhupender Yadav said. “The 12 cheetahs arriving from South Africa, under the visionary leadership of PM Shri @narendramodi ji to restore our ecological balance, have begun their journey to India. Indian Air Force’s C-17 Globemaster aircraft will get them home tomorrow. Get ready to welcome them,” Yadav tweeted.
The Indian Air Force’s C-17 Globemaster Cargo aircraft will transport the cheetahs, and it is scheduled to land at Gwalior Airport around 10:00am. For their long journey, radio collars have been installed in all the cheetahs and are monitored through satellite. Apart from this, a dedicated monitoring team behind each cheetah keeps monitoring the location for 24 hours.
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Once they arrive, the wild cats will be kept in quarantine for a month and their health will be closely monitored.
The second batch of cheetahs are coming five months after Prime Minister Narendra Modi kicked off the world’s first inter-continental cheetah translocation project on September 17 last year by releasing eight cheetahs brought from Namibia to the Kuno National Park.
The government launched the ambitious “Project Cheetah” with the goal of reintroducing the species to its former habitat in India, 71 years after the last recorded cheetah was hunted down in Chhattisgarh in 1952.
Earlier this month, civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said the central government is planning to translocate 14 to 16 more cheetahs to India over the next few months under the second phase of “Project Cheetah”.
