A law graduate, national executive member of BJP’s youth wing, Google Impact Challenge-winner, Sanchaita Gajapati Raju is all this and more. The first woman head of a major temple in India—the Sri Varahalakshmi Narasimha Swamy Vari Devasthanam in Visakhapatnam—the 37-year-old has a lot to say and even more to prove. Sanchaita was also recently made the chairperson of MANSAS (Maharaja Alak Narayana Society of Arts and Science) Trust that runs 11 educational institutions in Visakhapatnam and the neighbouring Vizianagram district. For this Delhi University graduate, the lockdown has been ‘eventful’ in more ways than one.
Her overnight accession to the temple and MANSAS Trust came by replacing her uncle and former civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapati Raju who had held these twin posts since Sanchaita’s father passed away in 2016. The temple trust and MANSAS were started by the Gajapati family, which has both royal roots in the Vizianagram Empire and boasts a political legacy in the state. Being a woman dharmakarta in a typically male bastion is controversial and achievement, but Sanchaita isn’t shaken or stirred. She is confident that her hard work will prevail. At the temple, she wants to bring in digital donations like Tirupati and raise a corpus, overhaul the quality of food served, build more bathrooms and plant more trees. On the MANSAS front, she’s pushing for it to become a deemed university, digitising land records, and build a corpus from scratch.
Little wonder that she is not afraid to step out of her comfort zone. “I took charge of the Simhachalam Temple Trust on March 4, just weeks before the lockdown. I had to take tough decisions on an expedited basis. We banned darshan even before the government called for it. We had to stream ‘Kalyana Utsavam’ and pre-rituals of ‘Chandanam Utsavam’ live online for the first time. It’s been an eventful few months,” she smiles. Recently, TDP—the opposition party in the state—criticised her decision to lay off the outsourced staff at Simhachalam Goshala. The lawyer strikes back: it was done in the interest of the temple economy that’s taken a hit during the pandemic. But, at the end of the day, Sanchaita doesn’t have time for this ‘slugfest’. When push comes to shove; she’ll approach the court again, she says. At present, she’s busy ‘fire-fighting’ the lapses left by her predecessor.
Daughter of former MPs Ananda and Uma Gajapati Raju, who went their separate ways in 1991, it is definitely not easy to win against someone like Sanchaita. She knows a thing or two about law. After all, she practiced briefly as a lawyer in Delhi, before floating her own NGO, Social Awareness Newer Alternatives, in 2011. It was then that she also won the inaugural Google Global Impact Challenge for her vision of bringing clean drinking water and sanitation to villages in coastal Andhra Pradesh. The prize money of `3 crore went towards her NGO work.
In April 2015, Sanchaita addressed the Women in the World Summit, hosted by The New York Times at the Lincoln Center in New York. She was also invited by UNESCO to address the conference on Sustainable Development Goals in Paris in September 2016. This self-confessed foodie chooses urban farming as her stress-buster. In fact, her love for urban farming has led her to collaborate with the Cornell University on a project. The Sri Varahalakshmi Narasimha Swamy Vari Devasthanam is located atop the Simhadri hills and boasts the largest land bank in the country (by a temple trust) at about 14,000 acres. Maybe Sanchaita’s urban farming can sprout some wonders here too.