No early end in sight to Pashupati woes
It’s unlikely that anyone can tell how long Pashupatinath Temple will have to wait for a pied piper to drive away the rats and cockroaches holed up inside the premises of most sacred Hindu temple.
The temple has been battling the mice menace for long, to the distress of priests and devotees alike. Officials, however, are unable to come up with any solution.
Rats and cockroaches are not the only problem that the UNESCO world heritage site has been facing. Its main structure is said to be dilapidated and the temple officials have been struggling to maintain transparency in monetary offerings.
Hit hard by political upheavals, the Ministry of Culture (MoC) has been unable focus on a report it received last month from a committee formed in accordance with a Supreme Court ruling.
The committee--Shree Pashupati Adhyayan Byawasthapan Swatantra Adhikar Sampanna Samiti--in its preliminary report has proposed three 'historic' solutions to solve the grave problems of the temple.
The first recommendation calls for providing fixed salary to the priests to strangle any debate regarding monetary offerings at birth. It has also proposed formation of a new autonomous steering body to govern all management issues of Pashupatinath. The third suggestion is the urgent need to keep records of the minute inventories of internal structure of the main temple which, according to experts, is already on the verge of collapse.
As nobody except the main priest is allowed into the main temple, the actual condition of the internal structure of the temple remains unknown so far.
"The ministry has not responded to our report yet," said Ram Prasad Dahal, spokesman for the committee. The report was just a preliminary one. The committee had sought six more months to prepare a new full-fledged report.
The ministry has not done anything to implement the recommendations. MoC Secretary Mod Raj Dotel, who recently resigned, said no action has been mulled after the report. After Dotel's resignation, his post has remained vacant, bringing discussions on the report to a halt. "I had sent a letter to the minister urging the formation of an administrative body with a month-long tenure under the ministry to study the report in detail," he said.
Another MoC Secretary, Pramod Karki (legal department), said the report hasn't
spawned any progress after Dotel left. "The political scenario has diverted the attention of the ministry," he said.
However, a highly placed MoC source, requesting anonymity, said the political situation should not be blamed for no progress. "While some officials have been strongly demanding that a committee be formed to study the report, another group led by the minister himself is for extending the previous panel by six months," he said. "As the monthly expense of the committee comes to around Rs 0.6 million, some officials, including Dotel himself, had been demanding that the ministry work for implementing the recommendations rather than extending the committee's tenure."
Posted on: 2011-08-17 09:17
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