Animal conservationists are aghast at Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis’s recent decision to relocate 50 leopards from state rescue centres to the Reliance-owned Vantara (Greens Zoological Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre).

Fadnavis, who heads the Maharashtra State Board for Wildlife (SBWL) claims this will help mitigate animal-man conflict. Jitendra Ramgaokar, chief conservator of forests (territorial) from the Maharashtra cadre, said, “Vantara is well equipped to handle leopards that have allegedly been attacking villagers”.

Retired Indian Forest Service (IFS) officer Dr Uma Shankar Singh, who served as director of Lucknow Zoo, decries this trend of handing animals over to Vantara. “Rescue centres have to be site-specific, climate-specific and need-specific; the whole purpose of a rescue and rehabilitation centre is to treat animals before returning them to the wild.”

Our politicians and bureaucrats think otherwise.

In the last four years, Vantara has emerged as the largest privately-owned zoo in the world, housing over 2,000 species. Between 2019 and 2023, Vantara acquired over 3,819 wild animals, including exotics. Many came from South Africa — a country notorious for breeding big cats for profit. Independent reports indicated that Vantara imported 50 hybrid lions, 40 hybrid tigers, 40 cheetahs, 10 servals and 20 giraffes from South Africa. Official records claim the numbers are much smaller.

So smitten is our political class by Vantara that Madhya Pradesh chief minister Mohan Yadav visited the facility several times and persuaded the MP Tiger Foundation Samiti to sign an MoU with Vantara to set up similar centres in Ujjain, Jabbalpur and Uno.

Additional chief secretary (forest) Ashok Varnal gushed that apart from Vantara providing scien-tific expertise on gene mapping, “tiger experts from across the globe” would prepare a database “for conservation, management and research purposes”.

Sounds great — if there are any tigers left to map. In 2025, Madhya Pradesh lost 55 tigers while Maharashtra lost 41. In the first six weeks of 2026 alone, MP lost eleven tigers while........

© National Herald