The Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Commissioner on Friday explained to the Madras High Court an elaborate plan devised to recover ₹2,390.81 crore in rental arrears due to various temples under the control of the HR&CE Department. He said that a target had been fixed to recover ₹540 crore this year, and that ₹80 crore had been collected already.
The submissions were made before a special Division Bench of Justices R. Mahadevan and P.D. Audikesavalu, who were seized of a contempt of court petition filed by temple activist R. Venkataraman last year against the then HR&CE Commissioner S. Prabhakar. The petitioner had accused the Commissioner of not complying with a court order passed on November 2, 2018 to submit a report on rental arrears due to temples.
Figure disputed
However, filing a status report, the HR&CE Department stated that the rental arrears for all kinds of property, including drylands and wetlands and commercial and residential buildings owned by the temples, were around ₹2,390.81 crore as on October 31, 2021. Mr. Venkataraman disputed the figure and said it was very minuscule. He estimated that the actual arrears would be several times more than what had been submitted in court.
Intervening at this point, Justice Mahadevan said thousands of temples in the State could be maintained well if the HR&CE Department succeeded in recovering at least the admitted amount. Since the HR&CE Commissioner, J. Kumara Gurubaran, had logged into the hybrid court proceedings through a video call, the judges asked him to explain the steps taken so far to recover the rental arrears due to temples.
He said an Integrated Temple Management System (ITMS) had been implemented in the State. Every small detail of all the 44,330 temples under the control of the HR&CE Department in the 38 districts of the State was being uploaded on the ITMS portal. Each temple had been given a unique ITMS code, and every property owned by the temple concerned, too, had been codified.
So far, four lakh temple properties had been mapped to the portal. Details of encroachers and top defaulters of rent were also being uploaded on the portal, he said, adding that the Department was recovering rental arrears to the tune of ₹1 crore to ₹2 crore on a daily basis.
Appreciating the efforts, the Division Bench directed the Commissioner to put his submissions in writing at the earliest.
