Indian wildlife authorities have imposed a gag order on “all concerned associated” with the cheetah introduction project, days after asserting that all cheetah deaths in the Kuno National Park had resulted from “natural causes”, a statement challenged by project insiders.

A July 18 “office memorandum” with the subject line “Protocol for dissemination of information about project cheetah implementation” has said only the “authorised officer” — the chief wildlife warden of Madhya Pradesh/ chief conservator of forests, cheetah project — will provide media briefings.

The document, signed by the member convener of the cheetah project steering committee, said any information on the project that requires to be shared with any international organisations, experts, or veterinarians “has to be done strictly” through the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), the Union environment ministry agency implementing the project.

Wildlife biologists and conservation officials tracking the cheetah project said on Friday that they were not surprised by the order that they say is in line with project authorities’ efforts to obfuscate information on the circumstances of some of the cheetahs’ deaths.

“This is getting beyond lack of transparency,” said a conservation official familiar with the project’s progress and the challenges that it has encountered. “For a conservation experiment to be successful, transparency is required. All data should be recorded, all stakeholders’ views taken into account. Only upon doing this can proper assessments be made,” the official said.

The order emerged two days after the NTCA released a statement saying all the cheetah deaths in Kuno had occurred due to natural causes. But experts within and outside India guiding the project have said two cheetahs had died last week from infections related to fly infestations near their collars.

Five of the 20 cheetahs that the environment ministry had flown in from Africa and three of the four cubs born in Kuno have died since March this year. A female cheetah had died in May after she was attacked by two male cheetahs. Project staff had placed the two males and the female in the same enclosure to encourage mating.

Multiple experts associated with the project have told The Telegraph that it would be misleading to describe the deaths of the female cheetah in May and the two cheetahs last week as “natural”.

Some wildlife biologists suspect that the gag order is intended to control the flow of any information relating to what some have described as a “vanity project” pursued by the Narendra Modi government without adequate assessment or ground preparation.

Domestic and international wildlife experts have been concerned at what they have viewed as a lack of enthusiasm and transparency by project authorities in communicating events in Kuno. Although the three cubs had died on a single day in May, project authorities delayed announcing two cub deaths by two days.

Project authorities last week said three cheetahs had been brought into quarantine enclosures without specifying why.