Religion And Charity: God Knows Where The Money Goes

Last year, a slum was gutted by fire in Delhi’s RK Puram area. Shops and homes were completely destroyed and the residents lost their only source of livelihood.  Most people had lost all that they had – and the general mood was of utter hopelessness and despair. The most pressing concern was where the next meal would come from. The nearby dhaba pitched in – serving free meals to the inhabitants.

The same neighbourhood also housed a temple, frequented and patronised (often beyond their means) by the slum’s inhabitants. The temple, though, didn’t offer any assistance to the slum-dwellers. When I asked one of the priests why the temple didn’t deem it necessary to assist a set of evidently distressed people who happened to be regulars at the temple, the priest said they couldn’t help without the approval of the head priest, who was away for the week.

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According to PM Dwivedi, Additional Chief Executive Officer at the Kashi Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi, the temple earned Rs 11 crore last year. The temple’s latest financial records peg its fixed assets at around Rs 75 crore.

Kashi Vishwanath, which has been described on its website as “a living embodiment of our timeless cultural traditions and highest spiritual values”, hasn’t sent any relief material to earthquake-affected Nepal yet. It hasn’t officially made any monetary donations either. Instead, as Dwivedi told Newslaundry, the temple has been organising “Shanti Paath” – a series of religious ceremony involving eleven priests – for the welfare of those affected in Nepal. The ritual has cost the temple around Rs 1,000 a day, claims Dwivedi.

Rajendra Jadhav, Executive Officer, Shri Saibaba Sansthan Trust – which administers the Shirdi Temple – told Newslaundry that its yearly income is Rs 600 crore.  Jadhav told us that this is only the cash earning. The worth of the gold and silver offered at the temple last year has not been evaluated yet.

The Ajmer Sharif Dargah’s annual income is reportedly above Rs 200 crore. However, when we contacted Syed Wahid Hussain Chishti, Secretary, Anjuman Committee of the Dargah to enquire about its contribution to relief work in Nepal, Chisti said the committee is yet to decide on what it should do to help Nepal.

Caritas India, which is the “official development arm of the Catholic Church in India”, earned in excess of Rs 100 crore in the last financial year, according to its annual report. Its website describes it as an organisation to “assist the Church in India in efforts to eradicate poverty, reach relief and rehabilitation in times of disasters and organize communities for self advancement”. An official of Caritas India told Newslaundry that the organisation has collected Rs 30 lakh for relief efforts in Nepal but curiously hasn’t been “able” to send the money because of legal hurdles.

So two fairly unambiguous inferences can be made from the above. First, religious institutes in India make big money. Second, some of the richest places of worship didn’t consider it necessary to donate any of it towards relief work in a neighbouring country that was recently affected by a calamitous earthquake that did much damage.

So where does the money go then?  Because clearly, our temples, mosques and churches are not quite rushing to helping people in distress.

Kashi Vishwanath’s Dwivedi told us that the money goes into celebrating festivals and providing food and dakshina to sanyasis. “Rs 21 is given to each sanyasi along with food every day,” he said.  Dwivedi also claimed that free food is distributed to people who come to the temple. “Clothes are occasionally given out too,” said Dwivedi.

Chisti of Ajmer Sharif said Rs 5 crore is spent annually on charity. The amount, according to Chisti, included scholarships to a thousand students, Rs 2,000 to 200 widows every month and medical help to people.  Chisti refused to reveal where the rest of the money  – which is almost 98 per cent of the Dargah’s total earning – goes.

Shri Saibaba Sansthan Trust’s Jhadhav told Newslaundry that he didn’t have a handy figure of the trust’s spend. An examination of the trust’s balance sheets revealed that it spent around Rs 50 crore on charity.  The trust also spent an additional Rs 15 crore on schools and medical institutes it ran.  The Shri Saibaba Sansthan Trust, hence, seems to have spent a little over 10 per cent of its cash earnings.

The official at Caritas International we spoke to said its annual spend was around Rs 80 crore. The official, however, said it didn’t spend much on charity, as it “doesn’t believe in the model of giving away cash”. According to the official, its idea of charity was more on the lines of community service and working with people on the ground.

We tried getting in touch with a few other religious institutes too like the Padmanabhan Temple, Kerala, the Nizamuddin Dargah, Delhi, the Immaculate Church, and the Basillica of Bom Jesus Church in Goa, the Sacred Heart Cathedral Church, Delhi, the Golden Temple, Amritsar and the Hemkunt Sahib, Uttarakhand.  These places, however, refused to divulge any information about their financials.

The above numbers, though only indicative of the larger trend, establish quite distinctly that the spend-to-income ratio of our much-revered religious institutions is rather low in most cases. So then does that mean our expectations out of them are significantly lower than, say, a corporate entity as far as social responsibility is concerned?  Also, perhaps more pertinently is their (quantifiable) contribution commensurate with the influence they have over people? If not, why should they not be treated like any other profit-making establishment and be legally bound to spend a certain amount of their earnings on social schemes like corporations are?

Going by the visible evidence of the crowds that visit these institutions, a large share of the money comes from lower income groups. These are, in all probability, people going through rough times who hope that a donation to a religious entity will change their circumstance. They are (obviously) given no guarantees and no money-back policy.  The practice of exploiting the universal need to strive to improve one’s condition by unaccountable institutions needs to be questioned.

Social commentator Santosh Desai thinks that religious institutions are answerable to society as opposed to the corporations, which hold their allegiance only to shareholders and hence there’s all the more reason for them to plough back the money to the society. “There can be no other legitimate applications of funds except for charity, except maybe for creating infrastructure that helps devotees,” says Desai.

Paul Zacharia, a Sahitya Academy Award winning writer known for his “heterodox” style, says religious institutions don’t contribute enough since they believe they don’t have a social responsibility: “People give them the impression that they are only answerable to god.”

But is it unfair to quantify the social contribution of these places of worship?  Not at all, according to Desai. “Since the devotion is often in quantitative form, why should the contribution not be too?” asks Desai. Zacharia, too, believes they should be held accountable. “They are beneficiaries of monetary donations, only reasonable they give back too,” he says.

Both Zacharia and Desai say the first step is for religious institutions to be more transparent about their accounts. “Temples often refuse to be audited. Why should they be not be audited when they are using public resources?” questions Zacharia. In 2013, the Guruvayur temple, in Kerala, which is home to a 33.5-metre (110-ft) gold-plated flagstaff, had told the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) it wouldn’t divulge details of the amount of gold it has.

Zacharia contends the media is the “biggest culprit” for having refrained from asking tough questions of religious institutes.  He is perhaps right when he says the gods won’t ask any questions but it’s time the media did.

Research: Kartik Nijhawan, Nirmolika Sangha and Divesh Sharma