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(CNN) More than 70 years after cheetahs were officially declared extinct in India, the country is now home to four newborn cheetahs, India’s Environment Minister announced on Wednesday.
The cubs were born to Siyaya and Freddie, two of eight rehabilitated cheetahs who were brought to India’s Kuno National Park in central Madhya Pradesh from Namibia last September as part of a government plan to give 50 of India’s big cats new homes the next five years.
Switch to TwitterEnvironment Minister Bhupender Yadav called the birth of the cheetah a “significant event in our conservation history”.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi also welcomed the announcement that called it “wonderful news”.
The announcement of the baby cheetahs’ arrival comes just days after one of the Namibian cheetahs, a female named Sasha, died of kidney disease.
While cheetahs were declared extinct in India in 1952, they are now once again roaming one of the country’s national parks.
The group, which arrived from Namibia in September, consisted of three male and five female adult cheetahs, including Sasha and Siyaya, according to a Namibia Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) press release.
The animals were moved from the quarantine enclosure to acclimatization zones in November last year and later released to the park.
In February, a dozen more cheetahs – seven males and five females – were introduced from South Africa, which signed an agreement with India to introduce dozens of cheetahs to the country over the next decade.
Cheetahs are India’s only large carnivores that are extinct.
Under British colonial rule, forests across India were cleared to develop settlements and establish plantations, resulting in loss of habitat for big cats, including the cheetah.
Cheetahs are considered less dangerous than tigers and are relatively easy to tame. They were also widely used by Indian nobility for sport hunting.
Today, spotted cats are found in southern and eastern Africa, particularly Namibia, Botswana, Kenya and Tanzania, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
But the endangered cats used to have a much wider range. Historically, cheetahs roamed the Middle East and central India and most of sub-Saharan Africa. Habitat loss, poaching, and conflicts with humans have severely reduced their populations.
According to the WWF, there are fewer than 7,000 cheetahs in the wild today.