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Rubbing of Ghee on the Stone Walls of Kedarnath Temple Threatens to Erode the Temple

Kedarnath Temple Withstood the Himalayan Deluge of June 2013 but people who are working on the restoration of the temple have found a new problem – ghee. Devotees after offering ghee with bare hands to the Shivling in the temple rub their hands on the walls of the Kedarnath Temple. This is a bad manner followed by devotees in most temples in India.

The bad practice of cleaning off the ghee on the temple walls have been going on for decades. Now there is a thick layer of ghee on the walls of the temple and is infested with worms. The thick layer stops the natural breathing of the rocks and this is leading to decay of the walls.

Due to this bad practice, engravings and paintings on the temple walls have been damaged.
India Today reports 

ASI Director ( Science branch) K. S. Rana says, " We have not witnessed the typical problem in any of our projects, which we had to face in the Kedarnath shrine. The ghee deposits turn hard with drop in temperature in the valley. We had to use a hot blower to make the ghee layer soft and scrape it off with tools. 
In the next phase we conducted chemical treatment and in the final step ' Multani Mitti' was applied to remove all the moisture from the wall." The ASI was successful in removing ghee from about 13- 15 per cent of the temple's wall area, getting two buckets from just the Akhand Jyot area of the temple's sanctum sanctorum.