Karnataka government issued a directive mandating the use of Nandini brand ghee in all 34,000 temples that come under the state’s temple management body.
The Karnataka government’s new directive requires that all temples under its jurisdiction use only Nandini ghee, produced by the Karnataka Milk Federation (KMF), for temple rituals, including lighting lamps, preparing ‘prasada’, and in the ‘Dasoha Bhavans’ -places where devotees are served food. The official circular stressed that temple staff must ensure that the quality of ‘prasada’ is never compromised.
“The reports about the defilement of the Prasad at Sri Venkateshwara temple in Tirupati are disturbing,” Gandhi said in a post on X. Lord Balaji is a revered deity for millions of devotees in India and across the world, he said.
“This issue will hurt every devotee and needs to be thoroughly looked into. Authorities across India have to protect the sanctity of our religious spaces,” the former Congress chief said.
As tensions mounted, temple authorities accused their ghee supplier of exploiting the temple’s lack of in-house food testing facilities. They argued that the absence of proper quality control had made the temple vulnerable to such scandals. Tamil Nadu-based AR Dairy Food Pvt Ltd,which had supplied ghee to the temple in June and July, defended itself, claiming that its product had passed multiple lab tests and constituted a mere 0.01 per cent of the temple’s ghee supply.
