Nanda Astami is a festival clelebrated to worship NANDA DEVI.This celebration relatest the conservation of our forests resources.This festival is celebrated towards the end of August,based on the harvesting of sacred flower called BRAHMAKAMAL(Saussurea obvallata).BRAHMAKAMAL is well known for its use as medicine,ornamental & religious purposes.
On the very first day of festival,two people are sent to forest for collecting the Brahmakamal.Each year two particular people as per the rituals demand,is given this responsibility for collecting the flower.This responsibility is fixed for every family of village celebrating this festival.More ever the list of pair of peoples for collection of sacred flower is already fixed for more than 20 years.So this time in the year 2017 Nanda Astami celebrated in the village MERAG(Joshimath,DISTRICT:Chamoli) two persons namely SUKHDEV SINGH RAWAT & ASHISH BIST from two family were given the above responsibility of collecting the sacred flower "Brahmakamal".
These flowers are specially founds in the sacred fields of forest where the selected pair of people are sent.These two persons takes the sacred bath and fast till they brings the sacred flower to main temple of Goddess Nanda Devi.Generally with naked feet and in white dressed the individuals travels a distance of approx 15kms from temple and arrives the destination of these sacred flowers where they performs certain ritual chants and prayers in Sanskrit and then start collecting the flowers.Only the matured Brahmakamal flowers are collected.According to a myth it is said that there is always a presence of a Honeybee when collection of flowers is to be started and when this Honeybee sits on a particular flower it is trapped inside that flower by collectors and collection of flower is started.Then this whole bunch of flowers along that inside which Honeybee is trapped is brought to the Temple of village.
This festival celebration gives a wise and unique cause of conservation of forest.This uniqueness is that by restricting the number of harvesters to the number-2, pool harvesting is restricted and more ever harvesting is done only after flowering and the shedding of seeds by the species has taken place so as so occur least damage to the propagation of this cared plant.In this manner the it is proved that how the our Indian culture or religion is associated with conservation of forest.
After this on the eve of next day of celebration two individuals arrives the temple of Goddess Nanda Devi along with bunches of Brahmakamal recieves the warm welcome by the chants of Goddess Nanda Devi whose incarnation takes place on one of permanent selected individual and Pujaari(Priest) as well as villagers.