Uttarakhand health department officials are trying to verify claims of Yoga guru Baba Ramdev of having found the 'Sanjivini Booti', mentioned in the Ramayana.
State Health Minister Ramesh Pokhariyal Nishank has already asked Ramdev to allow verification process of the new herb.
"We are trying to verify the importance of the new herb being found by Baba Ramdev's team," a top health department official has said.
The health department is also consulting the National Botanical Research Institute, which has done lot of research on the 'Sanjivini Booti'.
In the wake of the claims, the health department, which is also pursuing to find the herb, are unsure whether it would continue its research programme to find the 'Sanjivini' in the Himalayas.
'Sanjivini Booti' (Biological name Selaginella bryopteris) belongs to the carboniferous period, which existed about 300 million years ago.
It took less than a week for a team of Baba Ramdev's Divya Yog Trust to find the herb from the Himalayas.
With Acharya Balkrishna, a member of the Trust who was part of the team that found the herb, openly displaying the new find, a controversy is brewing up whether the 'Booti' is real.