'Callous' BJP insensitive towards nature: Congress

All India Youth Congress in-charge Suraj Hedge today lashed out at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on culling of animals and said the 'callous' government is directionless and insensitive to a lot of issues related to nature.

"What kind of inhuman order it can be? I think that the government has no direction, it is callous and they are insensitive to lots of issues which relate to our nature also.Who has given them the rights to issue such an order? What is the logic behind this?" he told ANI here.

Hedge further said that this was yet again a desperate attempt on the government's part to divert people's attention from important issues, including inflation.

"There is no coordination.Why is it that they are not in touch with each other? They just create unnecessary news. This is not in the nation's interest," he added.

Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi earlier in the day trained guns at the Environment Ministry while accusing it of frivolously granting permission to kill innocent animals.

Commenting on reports of a large number of deer being killed in Bihar's Patna city, Gandhi told ANI that she does not understand this 'lust' to kill.

According to reports, the Union Government has recently declared monkeys as 'vermin' and cleared the decks for their large-scale extermination in Himachal Pradesh's Shimla city.

Javadekar earlier today countered Gandhi's charges that the Environment Ministry thrived in the killing of innocent animals and asserted that such decisions were taken keeping scientific facts in mind to help those affected by such animals.

"I will not react on who said what. But as per the law, we must help the farmers whose crops get ruined. The state government sends us a proposal and only then we initiate a step for a specific region and for a specific period of time keeping the scientific facts in mind," he told the media here.

A call was earlier made in Goa to cull India's national bird peacock citing that the bird is creating a problem for farmers and destroying their cultivation in rural areas.

Similarly, the local forest department in Maharashtra culled a whooping 300 animals in the past few months after several farmers reported huge losses due to crop raids.