Hello,
This time, with a bang...2 days back (if I am sure), I came across this article in Times of India and was like
. But, that is something really with a
factor!
"Rs 50,000 crore is a lot of money, even for a deity." But many say this is just a rough estimate of the offerings devotees have bestowed at Lord Venkateswara's feet. A high court order to Tirupati's administrators may, in just a few months, reveal the actual spread of wealth. There is already tension in the temple town as the countdown begins.
"Govinda...govinda" muttered Ragahava as he inched towards the sanctum-sanctorum. "His munificence is awesome," said the bank official, the sweat pouring down his forehead drenching his white vest. Then, as he reached the cloth hundi in which pilgrims deposit cash, he took out a wad of notes and proclaimed, to other faithfuls crowding around him and to the Lord himself: "I owe everything to Him, at His feet I donate Rs 1,000." A short while later, an official from the temple committee took the donations from the hundi, which overflows with cash every two hours, inside.
Balaji, Lord of Seven Hills, is reportedly one of the richest deities in the world. In the nine days of Navaratri, which saw Brahmotsavam being celebrated at the hilltop shrine, close to Rs 12.05 crore came in, much of it through small donations from pilgrims. Ragahava was just one of the 7.35 lakh devotees who made the uphill trek for a darshan of the Lord who is popular with countless Indians, for whom a Tirupati visit is a must.
A mind-boggling 20 lakh pilgrims visit the temple each year, adding Rs 300 crore in offerings, most of it in hard cash to its kitty. Then there are donations that come in the form of gold 350 kg and silver 500 kg annually.
Often, people like Karnataka tourism minister Gali Janardhan Reddy gift the Lord stupendously expensive jewels like the 16-kg diamond-studded crown, like this June. BTW, it was priced at Rs 42 crore.
"The Lord is a great revenue churner," chuckled an official of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam, the Andhra Pradesh government-sponsored body that administers the temple. "We make Rs 100 crore every year just out of marketing the hair that pilgrims tonsure in the name of Balaji. The total annual income of the temple trust is Rs 600 crore and the budget outlay for the year 2008-09 was Rs 1,925 crore. TTD has more than Rs 1,000 crore in fixed deposits in various banks," said the official.
The riches of the Lord have only gone up in the last 15 years, with a steady increase in population and a rise in the ability to donate. In fact, the pattu peethambaram - the dhoti wrapped around the deity on important occasions - is woven with 66 kg of gold, the heaviest of the garments the deity owns.
There has always been lots of money floating around Balaji, tempting the East India Company in 1748, nine years before the battle of Plassey, to devise insidious ways of wresting control of the unending revenue source. A few years later, it finally browbeat the Nawab of Arcot into giving the Company total and direct control of the temple's administration. This continued till 1843.
"The temple controlled a lot of land and the East India Company was quite open about its greed, as were the French and the Mysore kings," said Varadachary, a Tirupati historian. "Nobody, however, had the guts to alienate the land that stood in the name of the temple. Most of it had been bestowed by earlier rulers of the area, many of them Vijayanagara kings. But a substantial part also came from kings before them, from the ninth century onwards. The East India Company made around 25,000 pounds every year from the temple in the mid-1750 s."
Just how rich is the temple then, receiving largesse as it has been over the last 1,100 years? "Rs 50,000 crore," says Bezwada Govinda Reddy, district Congress chief of neighbouring Nellore district, a man who says he's distraught that the shrine's administration is doing nothing to put a value to its riches. He has now moved a writ petition in the Andhra Pradesh High Court seeking public disclosure of wealth that's clearly massive. The high court, in turn, has directed the temple to do so within a few months' time. Not surprisingly, the temple management is groping hard to figure out its own spread.
"There is suspicion that much of the wealth shown on paper may have been done away with over the years," a local analyst said, not willing to be named. It was exactly this apprehension that made Reddy file the mandamus in court, contending in his petition that "there is strangely no public inventory of the Lord's jewellery as is elementarily mandated by any system of accounting" . Quoting from internal vigilance reports, he has detailed instances of jewellery and gold coins being pilfered by the TTD staff. Much of the pilfering, the petition says, took place while converting small jewellery into gold coins (known as gold dollars).
Soon after the HC directive, TTD officials began physically inspecting the inventory and discovered that at the Kodandrama Swamy temple alone, which it also controls, ornaments weighing close to 1.5 kg were missing. On interrogation, chief priest Venkataramana Deek****hulu confessed he had pawned the jewellery to raise funds for his daughter's wedding. "I am poor and needed the money for her marriage. I pawned the ornaments a year ago," he told the police and admitted that the sudden audit had caught him off guard. He hinted this was a "common practice" across many temples.
"There is supposed to be an annual inventory of the jewellery in Tirumala and the 24 temples controlled by the TTD," an internal source said. "The exercise is supposed to be conducted by the devasthanam's financial controller and chief accounts officer, who is an Indian Audit & Accounts Service officer. In reality, though, no audit takes place." He said that the post of the accounts officer had been vacant for six months.
He added, "In the last few years, the temple management has become populist and flaunts programmes like Dalit Govindam, in which idols of the Lord laden with jewellery are taken out of the temple . Who knows how much of the jewellery has been pilfered in the process."
D.
P.S: Moderators, kindly assist in case.
Re: Business with Balaji 
Linear Mode
