(TNS) — Prime Minister Narendra Modi will celebrate his birthday by releasing Namibian cheetahs into the wild in central India to burnish his conservationist credentials over an animal made extinct by colonial hunters and shrinking grasslands.
Since becoming prime minister in 2014, Modi’s birthdays have become yet another platform to help magnify his popularity. His supporters have screened films made about his life, held vaccination drives during the pandemic and launched a mobile app to help people communicate directly with him.
This time around Modi, who turns 72 on Saturday, will release the eight cheetahs flown in from Namibia into a special enclosure in the Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh state. The sedated big cats will then be kept in quarantine for a month.
Cheetahs went extinct two years after Modi was born and their reintroduction in India is the culmination of decadeslong efforts by successive governments.
“The reintroduction of cheetah in India is a step towards correcting an ecological wrong,” Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav said in a tweet.
While the cheetahs that went extinct in India are a different subspecies from those found in Africa, their function as top predators within the ecosystems in which they live is likely to be identical, the University of Pretoria, which is assisting with the reintroduction program, has said in a statement. More cheetahs are set to be brought to India in the next five years.
The mission is not without its risks.
The African cheetahs will find Indian reserves challenging due to a lack of suitable habitat of sufficient size. They will also face risks from other predators including feral and domestic dogs, said Ravi Chellam, a wildlife biologist and conservation scientist based in the southern city of Bengaluru.
“India currently just does not have sufficient habitats for establishing a free-ranging population of cheetahs,” Chellam said. “Introduction of African cheetahs is not a national conservation priority, the risk is not worth taking.”
