A high-level committee will be formed by the Uttarakhand government to look into claims of a 1.25 billion rupee scandal involving the gold plating of the Kedarnath temple’s sanctum sanctorum.
The state’s Tourism, Religion and Culture Minister Satpal Maharaj announced on Friday, he has directed the secretary of culture and religious affairs Harichandra Semwal, to set up a high-level inquiry committee with the Garhwal commissioner as its head to investigate the situation.
He proposed that the inquiry committee include both technical experts and goldsmiths.
The issue is extremely sensitive to the state government. Whoever is found culpable will face punishment, according to Satpal Maharaj.
He explained that the donation was accepted and permission was sought from the state government to gold-plate the sanctum sanctorum of the Kedarnath temple by the stipulations of the Shri Badrinath-Kedarnath Temple Committee Act, 1939.
The minister said, the gold plating was carried out under the direction of specialists from the Archaeological Survey of India and that a donor had purchased the gold and had it inlaid on the sanctum sanctorum’s walls without consulting the temple committee first.
According to Satpal Maharaj, the donor gave the temple committee the cost for the work after it was finished, along with other paperwork.
He charged that the opposition parties were attempting to ruin the Chardham Yatra by giving the issue unnecessary weight.
In an earlier declaration, the Badrinath-Kedarnath Temple Committee claimed that the sanctum sanctorum of the temple had 23,777.800 grams of gold. The overall weight of the copper plates used for the gilded work was 1,001.300 kg, with a total value of Rs 29 lakh, and its current worth was around Rs 14.38 crore.
In a recent video posted to social media, Teerth Purohit of the Kedarnath Temple and Santosh Trivedi, vice president of the Chardham Mahapanchayat, claimed that brass had been placed on the walls of the sanctum sanctorum in place of gold plating, and that the swindle cost around Rs 1.25 billion.
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