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A Dam Is Coming for Kuno — Cheetahs and All

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IWN Daily Digest — Wednesday, 16 September 2026

The Union environment ministry granted environmental clearance in April to the Chentikheda irrigation project, which will submerge eight villages around Kuno National Park in Sheopur district, Madhya Pradesh — the only place in India with a wild cheetah population. The project needs 1,361 hectares of land in total, 72 of them carved out of Kuno’s own forests.

As Scroll.in reported:

In April, the ministry of environment, forest and climate change granted environmental clearance to the Chentikheda irrigation project, which would submerge eight villages around Kuno. Of the total 1,361 hectares of land it will need, 72 hectares are from Kuno’s forests. Around 1,200 families living around the forest, of which around 900 are Adivasi, will lose lands and livelihoods.

Kuno is currently home to 48 cheetahs, 28 of them born in India since the translocation project began. One of those India-born cats, a male known as KP-2, walked several hundred kilometres from Kuno to Rajasthan‘s Ranthambore National Park in April.

Wildlife biologist Ravi Chellam, of the Biodiversity Collaborative, said Kuno was never large enough to hold the cheetahs on its own, which is why officials have talked for years about building a corridor across Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan for the cats to move through. “Any attempt to further destroy or fragment their habitat will have negative consequences,” he said. “We are destroying Kuno, which was seen as the prime habitat, the first site of the cheetahs.”

Chellam also questioned whether the submergence zone had been assessed as cheetah habitat at all. “The proposed 70 hectares of submergence could be a part of the home range or territory of the cheetahs,” he said. “Where is the cumulative assessment of all of these impacts on the cheetahs? It’s almost as if the right hand is not speaking with the left hand.”

Old Wounds

In the early 2000s, 24 villages were relocated around Kuno to clear space for Asiatic lions expected from Gujarat‘s Gir forest — a transfer Gujarat ultimately refused to go through with in 2004. Three of the eight villages now facing submergence were part of that earlier relocation, and are being asked to move for a second time in roughly a quarter-century.

“First, they took us away from fertile lands, then when we finally established some footing here, they are asking us to move again,” said Shivlal Khushwa, a resident of Pera-B village. He said officials had described the hospitals and schools promised at the new site, but not how much land his family would receive, or when.

Deependra Singh Bhadouriya, from Agara village, said his land sits upstream of the dam and won’t benefit from the scheme the way the land he’s losing already does. “Umri is upstream of the dam, so how will we be able to benefit from the irrigation facilities?” he said. “On the other hand, the land that we are losing is right next to the river and has irrigation facilities.”

Section 19 notifications, the legal step that identifies who qualifies for compensation, have so far been issued for only four of the eight villages, covering 177 families who own land in the submergence zone. That leaves out most of the people the project will actually affect, according to Budhaditya Das, a development studies professor at Azim Premji University. “Landowners are just a fraction of the people impacted by the project,” he said.

Das said the full rehabilitation and resettlement scheme has yet to be published, and that its release has already slipped from August 2026 to February 2027, which officials blamed on disorganised land records and displaced farmers who weren’t present for the surveys. He pointed to the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, which he said “has widened the definition of project-affected families beyond only land-owning households” to include the loss of forests, commons and informal livelihoods.

Independent legal policy researcher Kanchi Kohli said clearances of this kind are rarely weighed alongside resettlement and wildlife concerns together, calling it “a siloed approach” to decisions that affect both. The rehabilitation scheme for Chentikheda has yet to be published.

Sources: Scroll.in

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