This is the original version of the article published in the Op-Ed pages of the Times of India on 3rd September 2026.
For years, I have argued that temples must be freed from state control. But today I make an admission: you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. State control breeds neglect, private control invites plunder.
Leave temples in government hands, and you get the mess we have. In 2025 the Madras High Court struck down several state schemes to squander temple money on shopping malls and marriage halls. The same department that paid some pujaris nineteen rupees monthly could not answer an RTI query on what it collects or where the money goes. No church or mosque, of course, endures such endless supervision or abysmal administration.
But hand temples to private trusts, and we’ve seen what happens. A trust is only as honest as its trustees. If theft can strike the Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra, under the nation’s brightest spotlight, imagine the possible plunder at thousands of shrines nobody watches.
This is the dilemma. For generations we’ve been asked to choose between two ways of losing. But is there a third way that could win? I believe there is. Here’s a proposal, in six parts. It’s provocative but do hear me out.
First, kill cash. Every offering, archana ticket and hundi note to be paid via UPI. India built the most sophisticated payments rail on earth; why not use it? Some pilferage will survive, but the unaudited hundi that never hits the books will wither. Yes, it leaves a record of who gave what—a small price to pay.
Second, put capital to work. Not by selling the deity’s jewels—that’s a fraction of temple wealth. The rest is fallow land, idle buildings, gold asleep in vaults. Tirupati already melts donated jewelry into bars under the gold monetization scheme with no devotee’s faith affected. Why not replicate what our richest temple already does?
Third, pool and invest it. Let every temple’s monetised assets and daily collections buy units in an endowment fund—call it the Dharmic Endowment from Vaults and Assets, or DEVA. Each temple draws returns like a shareholder, in proportion to what it invests. Because offerings arrive daily, DEVA would be no static corpus but a perpetual one—a lifelong SIP, compounding endlessly. Managed like the world’s great institutional funds—Norway’s GPFG, Singapore’s Temasek, Abu Dhabi’s ADIA, or the endowments of Harvard and Yale. It could, in time, grow into one of India’s largest pools of capital.
Fourth, wall it off. Temasek is state-owned but the government is barred by charter from directing a single investment or dipping into the reserves. DEVA would adopt that architecture. An independent board, elected by the temples whose deities are the shareholders, would appoint specialists to run it, but never touch the money. The reserves would sit behind a statutory wall that no minister or bureaucrat could scale.
Fifth, bind the mandate. Discipline cannot be a hope; it must be formalised. DEVA need not build a costly in-house army of asset-pickers. Structured as a fund of funds, it would channel its corpus into the best index and mutual funds available, renting the market’s finest talent without paying to employ it. Its team would choose from an annually updated whitelist of audited, ranked funds—nothing indefensible against a risk-return benchmark.
Sixth, split the yield by rule. Like a university endowment, DEVA would never touch its corpus, only the returns, shared in fixed proportions set by its charter. One part goes to each temple for salaries and upkeep, so no shrine lives at the mercy of the day’s footfall. Another finances welfare, a Sanatana safety net much like missionary and waqf activities. A third is pooled for the smallest shrines whose offerings can never cover their needs. If demographic change is a national concern, Sanatana must not allow its institutions to wither. A community must care for its own with its own.
Some will object that temples are a state matter. Not exclusively. They sit on the Concurrent List, where Parliament too may legislate—and in conflict, its law prevails. The Centre already has the power to build this framework. And this does not ask for perfect men; it asks for a design that assumes imperfect ones and boxes them in.
Two thousand years ago, the poet Thiruvalluvar named four marks of an able ruler: to raise wealth, to grow it, to guard it, and to share it. They are precisely the duties our temples have been denied—by a state that fails while insisting no one else may try. The gods of this land have outlasted invaders, iconoclasts and interlopers. Surely, they can outlast an investment manager?
