Yadav chieftains lock horns over saving the tiger

India's two well-known Yadav chieftains -- Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav -- have virtually locked horns over the question of saving the tiger.

Alarmed by the spate of tiger deaths after being run over by trains the Dudhwa National Park (about 250 km from Lucknow), the Uttar Pradesh government has urged the railway ministry to shift the 'killer' track.

About 80 km stretch of the track runs through what is one of India's biggest tiger reserves after the Corbett National Park was responsible for the death of four tigers over the past three years.

The sprawling 510 sq km Dudhwa National Park had registered a tiger count of 77 as per the 2005 census. It was declared a national park in 1977 and being in the vicinity of the Corbett National Park, it was developed on those lines.

After bureaucratic-level correspondence failed to cut any ice between the state government and the railway administration, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav shot off letters to Rail Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav.

"The chief minister wrote to the railway minister twice over the past three months but not only has there been no response, we are waiting even for a routine acknowledgement," said a senior UP government official.

To follow it up, UP Chief Secretary Naveen Chandra Bajpai last week wrote to the Railway Board Chairman J P Batra on the matter. He has also conveyed the chief minister's displeasure over the lack of response from the rail ministry.

UP's Chief Wildlife Conservator Mohammad Ehsan is surprised by the railway administration's indifference to the whole issue. "On one hand , the prime minister has set up a tiger task force to check decline in the number of tigers in the country, and here his railway ministry does not even pay heed to our repeated requests in the larger interest of conserving the tiger," he told rediff.com on Friday.

Local railway officials pleaded ignorance about the correspondence between the state government and the rail ministry. "We have no knowledge about this. In any case a decision on this can only come from the ministry level in New Delhi," said a top railway official in Lucknow.