New Delhi: Scores of devotees at a Bihar temple were taken aback when a 16-year-old girl took out her eye to offer it to Goddess Durga on the seventh day of Chaitra Navratra.

The temple was suddenly filled with screams when the girl, Komal Kumari, started bleeding profusely from her left eye and was trying to get closer to the idol in Baheri block's Sirua village in Darbhanga district on Saturday morning.

She was immediately rushed to Baheri primary health centre (PHC) from where doctors referred her to Darbhanga Medical College and Hospital (DMCH) looking at her serious condition.

According to a report in The New Indian Express, it was not immediately known if the girl had hurt her eyes with her own fingers or with the help of a spoon or a sharp-edged object. Police spoke to some of the devotees present at the spot, but no intelligible explanation was offered by any.

Some devotees even claimed she had entirely taken out her eyeball and holding it in her hand.

However, DMCH superintendent Dr Santosh Kumar Mishra, who attended the girl after she was brought at DMCH said that the girl had took out both her eye simply with her own fingers, according to The Times of India.

“Some of the women, with whom she was observing the Navratra rituals, witnessed the incident but till the time anyone could interrupt, the girl had taken out her eyes,” one of the officers at Baheri police station said.

Komal had been an ardent devotee of Goddess Durga for the past ten years and had been reading out aloud the scriptural praises to the Goddess every day, villagers told police. She also often told her friends that Goddess Durga had appeared in her dreams a number of times and asked her to offer her an organ. The girl had failed in her matriculation examination twice.

Meanwhile, temple priest Bhavnath Jha said that according to rituals, on seventh day of worship of goddess Durga, ‘eyes’ made from seeds of golden apple (bel) are offered to her. “What the girl did is a psychological ailment and it can’t be justified,” he added.

"Such thinking and action are clearly an act of delusion, which could originate from a distorted perception of reality. What this girl did is an extreme case of superstition," said Dr Binda Singh, a Patna-based clinical psychologist.