The National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTA) has cleared the translocation of four cheetahs to the Banni grasslands, with two male-female pairs expected in July or August, pending a final nod from the Union government. It will make Gujarat India’s second cheetah-bearing state, after Madhya Pradesh.
The animals will come from Kenya—a deliberate departure from the Namibian and South African stock at Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno-Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary, and chosen partly because Northern-Hemisphere cheetahs avoid the thick ‘winter coat’ that had triggered the fatal, collar-line skin infections in the Kuno population in 2023.
The wild cats at Banni will be joined by cheetahs from Kuno as the Gujarat forest department works towards 12 animals, in phases over a year. And when the world’s fastest land animal arrives in Kutch this monsoon, it would mark the most consequential moment for Banni, putting it on the global wildlife conservation map and reopening a debate about whether Asia’s largest grassland can hold to the promise.
The supply line has not been smooth, though. Kenya earlier balked at the transfer after its environmentalists flagged that introducing a genetically distinct African cheetah population into Indian territory ran against International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) guidance on mixing subspecies.
South Africa, separately, paused fresh transfers pending a health review, with its conservationists calling Kuno’s mortality record—roughly nine imported adults and nine India-born cubs have died—‘unjustifiable’. The Kenya deal eventually got revived.
Banni is no ordinary release site. Spread across the northern fringe of the Great Rann, it rose from the sea through tectonic upheaval and spread over 2,600 sq km. It carries more than 60 species of grass and is considered Asia’s largest and richest grassland and the engine of a centuries-old milk economy. Its custodians are the Maldharis—Hindu and Muslim pastoralists spread across 19 panchayats whose buffalo and Kankrej cattle have grazed these lands for over 400 years.
That ecosystem was very nearly destroyed by a tree. In 1961, the forest department planted Prosopis juliflora to block salt ingress from the Rann. Locally called gando baval, or ‘mad tree’, it escaped control, swallowing roughly half the grassland and crashing its grass-fodder yield productivity from 4,000 kg per hectare in the 1960s to about 620 kg by 1999.
The restoration has been led as much by the Maldharis as the state. Around 100 km out of the 2,600 sq km area has been restored. Community forest committees uprooted the invasive trees across thousands of hectares and revived traditional virda water systems, coaxing native grasses back. It is on this hard-won recovery that 5 sq km of cheetah territory is being grafted.
The forest department’s blueprint is a fenced stage. A roughly 500-hectare enclosure has been ringed with nearly 9.8 km of chain-link fencing and built out as India’s first dedicated cheetah conservation breeding centre. The cheetahs will quarantine before being released into this enclosure, breed in a controlled setting, and, if the model works, seed a free-ranging population, feeding into the national target of a 60-70 cheetah metapopulation across a 17,000 sq km landscape by 2032.
Whether 500 hectares is enough is the project’s central tension. A breeding enclosure is not a home range; wild cheetahs roam hundreds of sq km, and critics of India’s Project Cheetah have warned of an ‘abysmal lack of habitat and prey’. Banni’s prey base is being bolstered with 500 black bucks from Gujarat’s Velavadar Wildlife Sanctuary in Bhavnagar, where two-thirds of the animals roam out of the reserved forest area. The naturally occurring herbivores in the grassland include nilgai, chinkara and wild boar.
To establish a breeding centre of a flagship carnivore species in a grassland surrounded by pastoralist human settlements is an ambitious project. For now, the cheetah returns to a paddock, not a plain. Whether Banni can give it the room to run—the one thing the species was built for—is the test.
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