How a clerk steals INR 100 crore from world's richest temple in Tirupati, and goes scot-free! Well, almost!

BYS VENKAT NARAYAN QUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

- S VENKAT NARAYAN QUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

He was a lowly employee at Tirupati's famed shrine, entrusted with counting offerings worth crores every day. Over decades, he quietly stole a fortune and bought properties, and went virtually unpunished even after being caught until the scandal finally began to unravel.

In the early 1990s, a young CV Ravi Kumar joined the Pedda Jeeyanagar Mutt, which oversees the spiritual affairs of the Lord Venkateswara temple in Tirumala, the world's richest religious shrine richer than the Christian Vatican and Muslim Mecca.

He was barely in his 20s then.

By 2023, aged 54, he was still with the Mutt-working as a clerk and handling one of its most sensitive tasks: supervising the daily counting of donations at the Tirupati Balaji temple, which ranged between INR40 million and INR60 million.

For more than three decades, Ravi Kumar's life seemed routine and uneventful. He came to work, did his job, and went home. Until April 2023, when the facade collapsed overnight.

A security guard watching the CCTV footage noticed Ravi Kumar behaving strangely at the temple's money-counting hub. A strip search followed, and Ravi Kumar was caught with nine $100 bills tucked between his buttocks.

He could hardly have said he was innocent, but he could well have claimed that this was a one-off, that he was hard-pressed and had given in to temptation just this one time, only one mistake in 30+ years of faithful service.

Instead, he made a stunning revelation.

He said he had been squirrelling away cash for over 20 years; that he had used the money to buy properties in Chennai, Tirupati and Hyderabad, and their market value now was about INR100 crore or one billion. His monthly salary was INR40,000.