Lucknow: Ram Temple Trust in Ayodhya is sitting on a corpus of nearly Rs 1,900 crore, according to the summary of the financial statement prepared on March 31, 2026.A day before the 2026-27 financial year commenced, a total amount of Rs 1,876.30 crore was found to be deposited in three bank accounts and invested in mutual funds.Investigators associated with the temple donation theft case have found that a total of Rs 66.55 crore was collected in donation boxes (‘daan patra’) in the temple between March 31, 2025, and April 1, 2026.“It shows that an average of Rs 18.30 lakh was received daily in donation boxes at the Ram Temple in the last financial year. We have not received the figures for this year yet,” an officer said.“During counting process, only the ‘hundis’ (donation boxes) which were almost full with cash were emptied and crores of rupees was scattered before the counting staff. Those speculating that the theft amount could turn out to be several hundreds of crores need to keep an important fact in consideration that the overall collection amounted to Rs 66.55 crore in a year,” a volunteer associated with the temple said.“We cannot estimate how much has exactly gone missing, but it would be safe to assume some portion of the overall donation has been stolen by the accused,” he added.While the final special investigation report and the conclusion of police investigation is still awaited, police teams have recovered Rs 78.94 lakh from the six accused who were arrested for theft on June 25.“The stolen amount could be much higher but instead of speculating we need to wait for the police investigation to conclude as they are the ones who have questioned the accused people,” the volunteer added.Sources said that the auditors, while examining the books of the Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, found out that every penny received through the mass donation collection drive (Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Mandir Nirman Nidhi Sarman Abhiyan) in 2021 was accounted for.Issuing a clarification soon after its July 6 meeting, the Trust said that out of the Rs 3,264 crore that was collected through door-to-door donation exercise five years ago, Rs 2,370 crore was utilised for various purposes with major expenditure being done on the construction of the temple.Over time, through online, offline and foreign donations as well as interest over deposits and investments, the overall corpus grew to Rs 1,876.30 crore by the end of 2025-26.
