Despite fall in hundi collection, Tirupati earns Rs2,262 crore

Although the Telengana agitation and Seemandhra employees strike had affected normal life in Andhra Pradesh , there was no major let up in pilgrim offerings to Lord Venkateswara at Tirumala, the country's richest hill shrine temple located in Tirupati about 550 kms south east of Hyderabad.

Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam's annual budget presented last week to the Board shows a fall in hundi collection by Rs26 crore at Rs832 crore (as against Rs859 crore in 2012) for 2013, when the agitation was at its peak. But the overall revenue is Rs2,262.52 crore, a hike of Rs15 crore over previous year's Rs2248 crore, say TTD officials.

The TTD has projected a whopping Rs900 crore as hundi collections for 2014-15 and an annual turnover of Rs2401 crore, an increase of Rs138 crore in the election year.

"Nearly 45% of our pilgrims are from Telangana," says a TTD official adding agitations only increased temple revenues. The temple revenues suffered only during the 70-day-long agitation by Seemandhra employees and transport services being affected.

Chief priest of Tirumala temple AV Ramana Dikshitulu and Agama Pundit Sundara Varadan said that people come to Tirumala for blessings of Venkateswara and also for redeeming their vows to the deity. "

Always there is more inflow whenever there there is a crisis," says Ramana Dikshitulu.

Last year, the TTD made up the losses in low hundi collections in the form of increase in sale of darshan tickets and human hair. "We got Rs220 crore from sale of human hair and Rs190 crore from darshan visits," says MG Gopalan, the executive officer of the TTD. The fall has been only sale of gold dollars, sale of laddu prasadam (projected Rs150 crore but sold only Rs130 crore), he says.

The Board is also contemplating transfer management of educational institutions and medical centers to an independent authority which involvement the Temple administration in non-spiritual activities like appointment of staff, doctors, teachers, etc and distracted them from the core spiritual functioning of the temple administration. "These activities are divergent from our core function of maintenance of temple but these were taken up only to provide succor to people of Tirupati. Almost 1-2 lakh devotees come to Tirupati every day impacting transport, roads, hotels, drinking water, security here, says TTD chairman K Bapiraju.

TTD also has huge surplus of funds. It has about Rs 706 crore in corpus investments, earned Rs 588 crore as revenue during 2014. It spent Rs 7 crore in advertisements last year, Rs 360 crore on wages and salaries. It has 14,000 permanent employees and 10,000 outsourced staffers. Its gratuity and pension funds alone are Rs 115 crore. It has fixed deposits of over Rs 2500 crore.

Besides all, the Tirumala temple has gold reserves and 52 tonnes of gold ornaments ( including antique gold ornaments and vessels of deity donated by kings and even British rulers since over 1000 years) which are worth over Rs 37,000 crore as per latest estimates. Every year it converts over 3000 kg of gold received in hundi from pilgrims as gold reserve deposits with nationalised banks.