There's something almost cinematic about finding stolen cash stuffed under cow dung. It sounds like a scene written for shock value. Except this one isn't fiction; it's part of a real police case unfolding in Ayodhya, at one of the richest and most closely watched temples in the country. For a shrine that draws lakhs of devotees and thousands of crores in donations every year, the Ram Mandir has always operated in a strange grey zone: enormous public trust, almost no public accountability. This summer, that gap turned into a scandal.
The story didn't begin with a police raid. It began years earlier, with a man named Mahipal Singh, who says he was the temple's accounts-in-charge. Singh claims that back in December 2021, he flagged irregularities in the cash-counting process to senior trust officials, including General Secretary Champat Rai and trustee Gopal Rao. Instead of an investigation, Singh says he was quietly removed from his post the very next day and replaced.
Singh has since gone public, alleging the theft of donations had been going on for a long time, and that trust leadership knew about it. According to reporting by The Wire, when the pilferage was first caught internally, the response wasn't to punish anyone; it was to ask the employees to quietly put the stolen money back, and move on.
One detail keeps surfacing across multiple reports: missing footage. Singh alleges that CCTV recordings from the cash-counting rooms covering roughly eight months were permanently deleted, allegedly to erase evidence of the theft. That's a serious claim, and it's one reason this stopped being an internal HR matter and became a criminal investigation.
Notably, the counting centre reportedly had two separate CCTV control rooms, one run by police, another by trust officials, which is now part of what investigators are trying to untangle: how organised, and how many people, across which institutions, were actually involved.
What turned public suspicion into a full-blown scandal was the money trail on individual staffers. Several low-paid cash-counting employees earning somewhere in the range of ₹18,000–20,000 a month were found to have acquired properties, vehicles, and businesses that simply didn't match their income. One of them, Lavkush Mishra, was arrested after police recovered around ₹10 lakh in cash from his home, some of it, per reports, hidden under cow dung. Another accused, Manish Kumar Yadav, had reportedly only joined the counting staff in April 2026 through a relative's recommendation, and CCTV footage allegedly showed him withdrawing donation cash within days of starting the job. That relative, Ramshankar "Tinnu" Yadav, is identified in multiple reports as Champat Rai's former driver, and is alleged to have been the one signing off on manipulated vouchers.
Perhaps the most damning detail is this: State Bank of India, which handles the temple's cash counting, has claimed it flagged irregularities in the process roughly three months before the scandal broke and recommended the counting staff be removed. According to media reports, the trust did not act on that warning, and may have shielded the officials later accused of theft. SBI, for its part, didn't escalate the matter publicly either, raising its own uncomfortable questions about oversight.
Estimates of exactly how much went missing vary and are still being verified. Former Samajwadi Party MLA Pawan Pandey alleged a range of ₹5–7.5 crore was unaccounted for; other reports have pointed to figures closer to ₹3 crore, with investigators trying to determine whether these numbers are based on actual audits, CCTV cross-checks, or estimates. A Special Investigation Team (SIT), formed by the Uttar Pradesh government at the temple trust's own request, has so far flagged around 70 suspicious cash-handling incidents caught on camera between late April and early June 2026, describing the picture as one of systemic mismanagement rather than a single, massive coordinated heist. Champat Rai has since resigned from his position, saying it was on moral grounds, and has publicly pointed blame back at SBI for the failures.
Strip away the specific names, and the pattern is a familiar one in India's temple economy: massive, largely cash-based donation flows, minimal external audit rights for the actual donors, and internal accountability that seems to activate only after a scandal becomes public rather than before. Devotees who drop money in a donation box have essentially no visibility into where it ends up a dynamic that isn't unique to Ayodhya, but is thrown into sharp relief here because of the sums involved and the temple's national profile.
It's worth being precise about where things stand: this is an active investigation. Some claims like the whistleblower's account of being pushed out, or the deleted footage, are allegations that are still being examined, even where they're corroborated by multiple reports. Arrests have been made in connection with specific cash recoveries, and the trust denies direct institutional wrongdoing even as individual staffers face charges. The SIT's financial re-examination is ongoing.
What isn't really in dispute is the underlying question the scandal has put back on the table: when an institution collects that much public money on the strength of public faith, who exactly is watching the register?
Sources & References
- OpIndia — "Ram Mandir donation theft: As SIT report highlights rampant mismanagement, the lack of accountability is glaring"— https://www.opindia.com
- OpIndia —Loot in Ayodhya Ram Mandir donations? What are the allegations, what actions have been taken, and SIT probe, explained— https://www.opindia.com
- The Wire —Theft in Ram Temple First Detected and Reported in 2021, Trust Removed the Whistleblower Instead — https://m.thewire.in
- The Week —Ayodhya Ram Mandir donation theft: ₹3 crore missing? SIT probes discrepancy amid Trust treasurer's revelations— https://www.theweek.in