The Cheetah Project Steering Committee meeting suggested that moving cheetahs to Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary can cause difficulties, and so attempting a surrogacy program at Bhopal Van Vihar can be a solution. National media reports suggest that the Steering Committee meetings have been shelved since then.

Records from the committee meetings from December 2023 to April 2025 also reveal that the Madhya Pradesh wildlife officials are struggling to revive the prey base at Kuno National Park. That is why the forest officials concerned are suggesting measures like introducing blackbucks from Agra’s Sikandra monument premises to boost the prey base number for cheetahs.

As per the records of the meeting on February 19, 2025, the committee members suggested moving “cheetahs which are too old for mating to Gandhi Sagar for training and building purposes,” and attempting surrogacy at Van Vihar.

“One female, which may not be suitable for breeding, and the Agyby coalition can be moved to Gandhi Sagar,” said H.S. Negi, who is a committee member at the Cheetah Project. However, the Madhya Pradesh wildlife officials along with Cheetah Project Steering Committee members also said that these suggestions are not in progress.

“There was a suggestion; however, there are no plans to act on it. The older cheetahs at Kuno have a good KI score and are healthy. The surrogacy aspect may have been a suggestion that was made. We have no plans to introduce it,” said another senior official to the national media.

Surrogacy in Cheetahs

Surrogacy as a technique to reproduce cheetahs has already been tried outside India. In 2020, Ohio Zoo officials announced that cheetahs had been born through in vitro fertilisation and embryo transfer to a surrogate mother. This was the zoo’s third attempt at in vitro fertilisation after decades of failed attempts at artificial insemination.

The director of Kuno National Park, Uttam Kumar Sharma, told national media, “There is no plan to introduce surrogacy. The cheetah population… female cheetahs can reproduce well into their late reproductive stages. There is no plan to move our cheetahs to Gandhi Sagar. The Gandhi Sagar cheetahs are young and we want them to give birth to healthy litters and spread the cheetah population.”

According to the MP wildlife officials, female cheetahs can reproduce litters until the end of their reproductive lifespan, which can go up to 10 to 12 years in the wild.

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