Prime minister’s prestige project draws accusations of ‘vanity and showmanship’ as big cats die
This month, wildlife rangers in Kuno National Park in central India spent 10 days on the trail of Dhatri, a Namibian cheetah. When they finally caught up with her in the forest, they made a gruesome discovery. She was dead, her body infested with maggots that had burrowed through neck wounds around her radio collar.
“This is the first intercontinental translocation of a carnivore,” said Yadvendradev Jhala, former head of the Wildlife Institute of India who helped spearhead the project but was removed this year. “The whole world is looking at this . . . We can’t afford to fail.” A group of South African scientists affiliated with the project last month alleged in a letter to India’s Supreme Court that they were being “ignored” and “had to beg for information”, according to Indian media.
Aseem Shrivastava, a forest official overseeing the project in Madhya Pradesh, added that the cheetahs had died from “natural reasons”. “We have lovely, rich wildlife left in pockets of India that require money to save,” he said. “Why would anyone want to reintroduce, or introduce . . . cheetahs to such unfriendly terrain, at a huge multimillion-dollar cost?”Prakash Jatav, whose village near the national park is lined with cheetah posters, last year sold two acres of land for about three times what it was worth before. A hotel is being built across the street.
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