Ayodhya's donation row is accompanied by a much bigger ledger, a regional economy worth lakhs of crores, a corpus of more than ₹3,500 crore and one question remains unanswered who is the book-keeper when faith is of an industrial scale?

Ayodhya / New Delhi · Thursday, 18 June 2026

Illustration. The temple of Ram Janmabhoomi was built, with virtually all the funds coming from the public handling the cash they produce is its silent challenge.

One of the busiest counting floors in northern India is perhaps the cash room of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya. Notes are delivered by the sackful, coins are weighed instead of counted and gold chains, silver anklets and large wads of hundred-rupee notes are passed to contract workers who make eighteen to twenty thousand rupees a month. Thus, when a few of them happened to be the owner of hostels, restaurants and SUVs, they began asking themselves. Take away the noise of the past fortnight, and that's the true story of the temple town: it expanded to massive proportions at an astonishing pace and the most difficult thing about being venerated by an ocean of human hearts and minds is maintaining accurate records.

It is here that the order of events is important, as this is where they have been intentionally obscured. In early June, local reporters noted discrepancies between the amount of money pilgrims seemed to be spending and what was being recorded in the books. It was this that the Samajwadi Party chief grabbed on 7 June and termed it as a "deeply sensitive" issue for “crores of Ram devotees” and urged courts to take note of this. The trust kept silent initially, and then said that its own audit conducted with the State Bank of India revealed no irregularities. Then it did one thing a body with much to hide almost never does: It requested state investigators. Within a week, a preliminary report and within two weeks, a final report will be prepared by a three-member Special Investigation Team, which Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has set up from the senior bureaucracy, the police and the finance department.

Catching itself | system | A system that catches itself.

But the fact that the inquiry was requested by the same institution that is being investigated should dampen the intensity of the word “scam.” These men who suddenly became rich are not trustees, or dignitaries of the temple. They are cash counting hands who are recruited via a private agency, the lowest level of the entire operation. A total of five or six of them were picked up by the trust's own cameras. The police officers by the time the SIT came in through Gate 11 had already recovered about a couple of crores in cash, luxury car and a bunch of phones and had questioned the official who manages the place. Here is what accountability should look like while it is occurring: sloppy, highly public, embarrassing, but not a cover-up.

It also indicates the true weakness it's not theology. At the time the temple was opened, the offerings were thrown into approximately ten donation boxes; now there are nearer forty. The counting was delegated to outside workers with low salaries, and the anonymous cash was requested to be counted in amounts too big for a medium-sized bank branch. A back office that is added on, and not designed, makes it easy to steal untraceable devotional funds anywhere in the world and it's got nothing to do with the faith of the people in the boxes.

None of this is make-believe unease. With this kind of public money, an institution shouldn't be able to dodge all questions with an assurance that the audit is in progress. If the footage from the counting room is deleted over a few months, as has been alleged, it isn't careless filing, it's more like suspicion turned to conviction. The demand for transparency has not only been raised by the opposition. A party official has sent a letter to the Prime Minister demanding the trust's accounts, bank details and land dealings be made public, the state Congress chief wants the exercise handed over to a sitting High Court judge, not a government panel. Those who were spending money quite recklessly because of their faith have legitimate grounds for a tidy, line-by-line account of what they have spent.

The ledger following the row

The ledger is big enough to warrant one though. The trust was established in February 2020 and received contributions from the common people, with the Central government contributing one rupee, which amounted to more than ₹3,500 crore, most of which was received during the frenzied year following the laying of the foundation stone. Nearly ₹2,150 crore of that has been spent in the temple itself, compared to an estimate of about ₹1,800 crore, and almost ₹400 crore in tax, belonging to the exchequer. As can be seen in the figures below, the trust makes approximately the same amount of money from interest on its reserves as it does from new offerings. In comparison to all that, the purported leakage if it is leakage, a serious crime if it is is a leak in a very large tank, not the draining of it.

The source from which an income can be derived for a year.

₹327 cr

a single year

Offerings · ₹153 cr

Interest on reserves · ₹173 cr

The body of the text versus the contentious issues covered in it.

Donations raised

3,500

Spent on building

2,150

Taxes paid

~396

Alleged missing

7.5–200

Figures in ₹ crore. Range stated in reports; not substantiated.

Accept claims of trust and official statements from the time of the temple's founding in 2020. 1 Crore is equal to 10 million.

If you step back, the temple is no longer a building, it's an economy, it's a world in its own right. Nearly 13.8 crore people visited Ayodhya in the nine months following the consecration, with almost three lakh visitors coming in every day, which is more than the number that visit Mecca and the Vatican every year. The State Bank of India has estimated that the economic contribution of pilgrims to the town is at least of ₹4 lakh crore in one financial year. The government has injected over ₹30,000 crore into a proposed redevelopment which includes a new airport, roads and a citywide facelift. Land values have increased between one-quarter and two-fifths since 2022 and over 150 hotels including Taj and Radisson operate at 60-70 per cent occupancy, with Domino's and Reliance Trends following suit. The trust itself has more than 1,000 employees, society and hospitality are expected to create a lakh jobs and the traders' body CAIT estimated that the consecration week created more than ₹1 lakh crore of business across the country.

A pilgrimage that attracts the world's great shrines

Ayodhya

13.8 cr

Mecca

~2 cr

Vatican

~0.9 cr

Approximate number of visitors in crore (1 crore = 10 million). The figure of Ayodhya is applicable for the first nine months from the consecration in January 2024.

Everyday slanging match is the dimension this is hiding out of. The overall temple economy in India is estimated to be in the range of ₹3 lakh crore and ₹6 lakh crore annually a little over two per cent of national output, around forty billion dollars and the Indian religious-tourism market is expected to more than double from around 200 billion dollars at present to over 440 billion dollars by the early 2030s. Faith is not a side business, it is a major business in which trusts and temple boards, not listed companies, are the parties involved. The Vatican which has itself been the subject of a series of scandals, spent ten years manoeuvring its finances into the world of proper audits. Saudi Arabia is a well-managed revenue-generating venture in relation to the Hajj. The temple boards of southern India of which Tirupati is one have had to learn this the hard way: The anonymous, sacred and vastness of hundi cash makes it uniquely hard to police. Now Ayodhya has joined that club and the lesson is the same in all the clubs.

Devotion scales beautifully. Bookkeeping doesn't until someone builds to it.

So back to the politics and why the row has been so depressing. Opposition's opening salvo “transparency” was correct, their follow up was “opportunistic”. The same leader after initially raising the alarm of theft, said that if the officials were allowed to investigate a temple and its priests, it was an insult to Sanatan Dharma and then half-jokingly suggested to switch off the cameras and let the culprits quietly take the money back. Since then, a fortnight of escalating violence has included new allegations of land grab and missing videos. As for a leader trying to be both the accuser and the defender of the faith at the same time, and who is able to “hear the crowd” and adjust to the appropriate level of outrage, it's difficult not to see a bit of that in this guy. Rather than disclosure, the ruling side has responded to its critics with whataboutery, as its deputy chief minister asked rhetorically if anybody would ask the same of money once collected for the Babri mosque.

Ignore all that and the structure makes sense, and is far more interesting than the name-calling. A project that languished in legal limbo for much of a lifetime, was done in less than five years and in doing created a financial entity of a magnitude and speed not envisioned by the temple-governance rules of India. If the SIT does turn up the pilferage, it would be just as it should the failure of a back office that never caught up with the front of house, and not because the enterprise was rotten, nor because the millions of donors who gave were indicted. The only honest answer is neither the opposition's theatre, nor the government's defensiveness. It is the boring, not the sexy job of reform real-time digital auditing of every rupee, statements an ordinary citizen can open and read, independent audit with real teeth, counting rooms in which the cameras are never turned off.

Ayodhya was put forward as an example to the nation that faith and modern ambition could have the same address. The donation row is just the bill for that ambition coming in, a test of whether an institution made on belief can be made on books which all are free to view. The temple having raised their hands for examination is to be commended. Now the remainder of the system must pass.