Void at India's most donated-to temple

In the first few days after the Ram Mandir opened its doors to devotees in January 2024, the temple received around ₹11 crore in donations, averaging nearly ₹1 crore per day. (OpIndia) By the time its first full financial year closed, the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust reported annual earnings of nearly ₹327 crore during FY 2024–25, with donation offerings contributing ₹153 crore and interest income accounting for ₹173 crore. (OpIndia) These are not the numbers of a religious institution. They are the numbers of a mid-sized corporation, one that, unlike a corporation, owes its shareholders no quarterly report, no public audit, and no explanation.

That arrangement held comfortably until June 2026, when it didn't.

In early June 2026, a controversy erupted over alleged embezzlement of funds and valuables from daily chadhava offerings at the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Temple in Uttar Pradesh's Ayodhya. (OpIndia) The allegation at the centre of it was specific and damning: Mahipal Singh, the temple's former chief accounts officer, alleged that approximately ₹7 crore had been siphoned off from donation funds, and that CCTV footage related to the incident had been deleted. (OpIndia) Singh further alleged, according to media reports, that he had raised these concerns internally only to be removed from his post the very next day by the Trust's General Secretary, Champat Rai. Rai has categorically rejected the missing-funds allegations.

What followed was not merely a financial controversy. It was a case study in what happens when faith is monetised at scale, and accountability is treated as optional.

The physical evidence that investigators uncovered deepened the story considerably. Investigations revealed that employees earning ₹18,000 to ₹20,000 per month had purchased properties worth ₹1.5 crore and ₹40 lakh, respectively. (Sanatan Prabhat) During police raids, family members of one accused admitted to the recovery of ₹10 lakh in cash hidden in the house. (ETV Bharat) Over 50 employees linked to the temple management have come under scrutiny. (OpIndia) The arithmetic was hard to ignore: a salary that wouldn't cover rent in most Indian cities, and real estate purchases that would make a mid-level bank manager envious.

On June 14, the Uttar Pradesh government constituted a three-member Special Investigation Team to investigate the alleged scam involving offerings made at the Ram Mandir, comprising Vijay Vishwas Pant, IAS; Kiran S, IPS; and Neel Ratan, Special Secretary, Finance, directed to submit preliminary and final reports as soon as possible. (ANI News) The Trust itself had requested the SIT, framing the move as a desire to clear its name. Whether the probe will have the independence to do anything more remains, at the time of writing, an open question.

This is not the first time the Ram Mandir Trust has faced financial scrutiny. Five years ago, the Trust was questioned for allegedly paying ₹18.5 crore for a piece of land that was worth ₹2 crore. (NewsGram) In a separate instance, an FIR was registered against a local temple priest and a revenue clerk for allegedly forging documents and fraudulently selling the property of an ancient religious asset, Naya Anand Bhavan Temple, to the Ram Mandir Trust for ₹6 crore, even though court orders had already stripped the priest of ownership due to misconduct. (The Wire) The common thread running through these episodes is not merely wrongdoing alleged or established but the structural conditions that make wrongdoing so effortlessly possible.

Fresh questions have also emerged over the Trust's expenditure, with financial records showing nearly ₹10 crore spent on security and around ₹11 crore on bhog and prasad over 11 months between April 2025 and February 2026, roughly ₹1 crore on security alone every month, despite the temple already being protected by multiple layers of government-deployed forces. Investigators are examining security arrangements after records showed expenditure of nearly ₹10 crore on CCTV systems and private security personnel, and are seeking to establish how alleged thefts from donation collections could occur despite these measures being in place. The irony is almost architectural, expensive surveillance equipment, and yet the footage that mattered most appears to have vanished.

To place the Ram Mandir controversy in its full context, one must look at the broader landscape of temple finance in India because Ayodhya is not an anomaly. It is, at best, an extreme example of a systemic problem.

The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), established in 1932, has a total net worth estimated at ₹3 lakh crore, making it the richest Hindu temple board in the world. (Wikipedia) Its approved budget for FY 2024–25 stood at ₹5,142 crore, with hundi offerings and devotees' direct donations constituting the largest source at ₹1,611 crore, followed by interest receipts at ₹1,167 crore. (business-standard) And yet, even the TTD which operates under state government oversight and is widely considered more regulated than most temple trusts has not been immune to scandal. Between 2019 and 2024, the CBI alleged one of the biggest religious food scandals in the country's history: a ₹250-crore fraud involving adulterated ghee used to prepare the temple's famous laddus, with four tankers of rejected ghee allegedly reprocessed and resupplied through a dairy. TTD's FCRA licence has also been kept in abeyance for three years after the Home Ministry found its annual returns filed in an incorrect format, meaning it cannot legally receive or bank foreign hundi donations.

The pattern is consistent across India's wealthiest temples: colossal inflows, opaque outflows, and accountability that exists largely on paper. Hindu temples form the majority of the approximately 30 lakh places of worship in India, and in many states their funds are managed by the state's Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments department. Meanwhile, Muslim and Christian places of worship are typically overseen by community-based boards functioning independently of government control. The debate around this disparity is ongoing and contentious. But what gets lost in that argument is the simpler question: regardless of who oversees temple funds, why are ordinary devotees the actual source of this wealth granted no meaningful right to know where their money goes?

The Right to Information Act, for all its limitations, does not extend to private trusts like the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust. A farmer from Sitapur who donates ₹500 at the hundi cannot file an RTI to ask why a trust employee earning ₹18,000 a month just bought property worth ₹1.5 crore. A retired schoolteacher from Patna who mailed her gold bangles to Ayodhya cannot demand a receipt beyond faith. The devotee is the donor, the funder, and simultaneously the least informed stakeholder in the entire arrangement.

This is the quiet scandal beneath the loud one. The CCTV footage, the disproportionate assets, the missing crores, these are symptoms. The disease is the assumption, long embedded in how India manages religious institutions, that faith excuses transparency. That reverence and accountability are somehow in tension with each other, when in every other domain of civic life, institutions that handle public money are required to show their work.

The God in the sanctum sanctorum, it bears saying, requires neither a Toyota Fortuner nor a ₹1-crore monthly security budget. He requires, by theological consensus, nothing at all. It is the humans administering his estate who have developed rather more expensive tastes, and it is the humans donating to it who deserve, at minimum, to know where their offerings end up. That this remains a radical demand in 2026 is the real indictment.

References:

1. The reporting in this article draws on coverage from OpIndia (June 2026) 
2. Sunday Guardian Live (June 2026) 
3. ETV Bharat (June 2026)
4. ANI/ANN (June 2026)
5. Free Press Journal (June 2026)
6. The Wire (June 2026)
7. NewsGram (June 2026)
8. Business Standard (January 2024)
9. Gulf News
10. India TV News and Deccan Herald archives. 
11. For land purchase controversy context: Tribune India (June 2021). 
12. For TTD budget: Business Standard (January 2024). 
13. For TTD net worth: Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (Wikipedia sourced from TTD official records). 
14. SIT composition: ProKerala/ANI (June 14, 2026). 
15. Tirupati ghee adulteration: Gulf News investigation. 
16. TTD FCRA lapse: HanumanStories.com citing Home Ministry records. 
17. Ram Mandir annual earnings FY 2024–25: Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust Annual Report, September 2025