The project Cheetah has achieved another milestone in Madhya Pradesh with the arrival of its fourth cheetah at the Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary. Mohana Yadav, the Chief Minister of the state, released a three-year-old cheetah called CCB-2, onto a protective enclosure in Magooshan on Sunday and named it ‘Radha’ on the eve or Radha Ashtami day.
Gandhi Sagar is now home to two cheetah females and four males, all of whom are African. Male cheetahs Prabhas and Pawak and female cheetah, Dheera were already present in the sanctuary before that. In April 2025, Prabhas and Pawak were moved from Kuno National park to Gandhi Sagar and Dheera was moved there in September 2025.
Original home of Radha was Botswana and she was moved from Kuno National Park to Gandhi Sagar. Both her and her counterpart Mahesh, who will come from the Nanson Instrumental group, will be part of the overall plan in Project Cheetah, whereby the animals will not be kept in a single location.
Having cheetahs from other genetic lines present will also help with long-term conservation and breeding. Officials are watching Radha to see if she’s adapting and doing well once she is free, and the other cheetahs remain in their separate enclosures as well at the sanctuary.
Kuno National Park is the second large scale cheetah nest in India, development of which started under Gandhi sagar. This is the latest of a series of actions taken to broaden the range and create several successful populations for Project Cheetah. A few other potential Tiger reserves have been put together in Madhya Pradesh, with secure enclosures at Veerangana Durgavati reserve set to be ready for translocations in the future.
The expansion will also help in wildlife tourism and provide employment opportunity to the local communities as Madhya Pradesh is moving forward in making protected area network and its conservation programmes.