KOCHI: For the past 70 days, a team of 790 Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB) employees is busy counting the money put in offering boxes during the Mandala-Makaravilakku pilgrimage season. Specifically, it is the piles of coins that has made their task arduous. The total worth of the coins is estimated to be around Rs 30 crore!
The unprecedented rush of devotees – almost 1 lakh a day – witnessed at the hill shrine during the pilgrimage season this year, led to offering boxes filling up.
Now, the money has to be counted and recorded before it is moved to banks. Though the hill shrine has been closed since January 20 after the pilgrimage season, the TDB team cannot leave without counting and recording each penny received as offering. The work, as one exhausted staffer lamented, is proving to be never-ending.
TDB employees to get break from counting; exercise to restart on Feb 5
Realising their plight, TDB has decided to stop the counting of coins from Wednesday to give the employees a break. The exercise will resume on February 5 and is expected to take at least five more days. As per indications, the coins alone would net the TDB a whopping Rs 30 crore! This would take the board’s total revenue to Rs 350 crore, surpassing the previous record of Rs 270 crore in 2017-18.
So far, the board has earned around Rs 320 crore from the two-month-long pilgrimage season. This includes money from the sale of appam and aravana prasadam and the sum received as currency notes in offering boxes. Offerings received at Pampa and Nilakkal need to be counted.
Meanwhile, TDB will miss the Kerala High Court’s January 25 deadline to submit revenue details.
“We will not be able to submit final revenue figures in the High Court by Wednesday as the counting will take a few more days to complete,” said TDB president K Ananthagopan. The board is confident of completing the counting of coins before February 12 when the temple reopens for monthly poojas.
When TDB faced a similar challenge in 2017-18, Dhanalaxmi Bank turned saviour by bringing in machines to segregate and count the coins. This time, the machine is being used for segregating coins only. TDB discontinued its practice of segregating and weighing the coins to calculate the value after it suffered losses.