India announced that a female cheetah, which was among eight cheetahs "sent" from Namibia, had given birth to four cubs.

Cheetah cubs appeared decades after their species was declared extinct in the country in 1952, reports BTA.  

India's Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav tweeted a photo and video of the baby cheetahs, calling the event "significant".

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also took to social media to welcome the "wonderful news".

Cheetahs are returning to the wild in India to rebuild the population

According to local media reports, a second female cheetah from Namibia, which was reintroduced to India last year, is expected to give birth soon

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At the beginning of this year, 12 more cheetahs arrived from South Africa to complete the first "set".

The announcement of the birth of the four cheetah cubs comes a few days after the death of one of the Namibian cheetahs in Kuno National Park, a nature reserve 320 kilometers south of Delhi.

The animal died of kidney failure.

The Asiatic cheetah was officially declared extinct in India in 1952.

Maharaja Ramanuja Pratap Singh Deo is believed to have killed the last three specimens recorded in a census in India in the late 1940s.

A small number of representatives of this subspecies, which once roamed the Middle East, Central Asia and India, are today found in Iran.

The disappearance of the cheetah in India is mainly due to hunters lured by its valuable light brown fur with characteristic spots, but also to habitat loss.

The cheetah is listed as "vulnerable" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species.

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