Richest temple in India sacks 1,300 contract workers due to COVID-19 lockdown impact

The crippling impact of the coronavirus lockdown has not spared even places of worship and religious institutions as the richest Hindu temple in India has shown the door to 1,300 temporary employees in Andhra Pradesh.

The famous Sri Venkateshwara Balaji temple atop Tirumala hills, which had to shut its doors to hundreds of thousands of daily visitors in March as part of the lockdown to deal with COVID-19, has removed 1,300 contract workers engaged for sanitation and hospitality duties.

The decision by the authorities of Tirumala Tirupati Devsthanam came to light when they informed the manpower supplier that the contract of 1,300 workers will not be renewed. The last contract expired on April 30 and the workers were asked not to come to work from next day. TTD Chairman YV Subba Reddy when asked about the removal of workers said, “I am aware of the development and we will explore the ways to help them”.

The temple known for its riches and also massive annual income from the charity and offerings of the pilgrims has remained closed for almost one and a half months, leading to a considerable loss of revenue.

Tirumala temple attracts about 100,000 pilgrims on a normal day and the number goes up to half a million on special days and gets huge revenue from the offerings made in cash and kind by them.

With all these activities coming to a halt due to the threat of coronavirus, Subba Reddy said that even the regular employees at the Tirumala and other temples don’t have any work and only skeletal staff was attending essential works. The temple has about 5,000 regular employees and workers on its pay roll.

Apparently the decision to send back 1,300 contract workers was aimed at cutting down the expenditure when the temple was not getting any revenue.

The wealth of the temple could be estimated from the fact that it has cash deposited of more than Rs12,000 crore in several banks in addition to massive reserves of gold, silver and diamonds and priceless antiques. Some estimates put the gold reserves of the temple at 9,000 kgs. On cash deposits alone the temple earned an interest of Rs4 billion last year.

During the financial year 2019-20 the temple was estimated to have a revenue of more than Rs30 billion.

The annual budget of TTD for the current year was Rs33 billion and funds were marked for many new expansion plans, including installation of 1,300 CCTV cameras and strengthening the vigilance and enforcement department with more recruitment. But Coronavirus induced lockdown seems to have forced the authorities to review them and cut down the planned expenditure.

Source: Gulf News