Bhopal: India is going to set up the largest cheetah breeding centre within three states and 17 districts. This large proposed area will comprise forests from Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, with the latter being the most important. This new zone of cheetah conservation is going to begin in Kuno National Park in MP, which was established earlier as India’s first national park for cheetahs.
This comes at the time the country is celebrating two years of the Cheetah Project, and the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) has prepared its annual progress report. From the sources, this report presents details on the establishment of the largest cheetah conservations in the country. The conservation zone will start from Kuno National Park of Sheopur MP and extend up to Mukundra Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan and then to Gandhi Sagar Sanctuary, Mandsaur MP. This large expanse of land will indeed be christened as India’s largest cheetah habitat. However, it is still uncertain how large an area is covered by this protected region as the detailed plan of the park is yet to be finalized.
The NTCA report also raises its view that work on this corridor is expected to commence within the next five years. In the project, the authors have proposed a long-term plan of cheetah conservation for a quarter of a century with the aim of increasing the size of the cheetah’s range. In the next few years, the cheetahs will likely be forming a corridor between Kuno and Gandhi Sagar, and in the next five years, they will be entirely reintroduced into the wild.
At the moment, the Cheetahs in Kuno are restricted within a space of 1- 1.5 square kilometers of enclosure. It was established that each cheetah needs almost 50 square kilometers of land, which is why this kind of effort is necessary more than ever. The proposed area will be composed of districts from the three areas, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh.
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