By AMIT KUMAR
Ram Mandir Donation Scam: UP Government Forms SIT as ₹7 Crore Goes Missing from Ayodhya Temple
Lucknow, June 14, 2026 — The Ram Temple donation row is now escalating into a major controversy. Former BJP MP Vinay Katiyar has opened a front against the Ram Temple Trust members, vowing to get them expelled.
The donation row, first alleged by former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, involved the purported ₹7 crores unaccounted for. The state government has constituted an SIT, consisting of the serving officials, to submit a report in a fortnight.
Incidentally, the Ram Temple Trust had sought an enquiry after Yadav levelled the allegations. Unlike other major Hindu temples which are under the state governments, the Ram Temple is administered by a trust, which is headed by Vishwa Hindu Parishad leaders and former principal secretary to the Prime Minister Nripendra Mishra.
Reports said that the Ram Temple has received over ₹3,000 crore in donations since its consecration. But it is now at the centre of a controversy over allegedly missing funds. The political fallout has forced Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s government to act with unusual speed.
On Saturday, June 13, the Uttar Pradesh government constituted a three-member Special Investigation Team to probe alleged irregularities in the monetary offerings made at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, according to IANS.
The controversy has shaken one of India’s most politically charged institutions at a moment when both the BJP and the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust have the most to lose from any suggestion of financial mismanagement.
What Triggered the Crisis
The immediate spark came from Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav, who posted on X that reports had emerged of crores of rupees in donations going missing from the Ram Mandir. Yadav described the incident as “utterly shameful” for the temple trust and demanded the court take suo motu cognisance of the matter. The SP chief went further, calling for an independent judicial inquiry and urging the temple administration to release all relevant CCTV footage for public scrutiny.
The figure being cited by opposition parties is approximately ₹7 crore. Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Sanjay Raut held the BJP governments in the Centre and Uttar Pradesh responsible for the alleged misappropriation of funds worth ₹7 crore from offerings made at the Ayodhya Ram Temple.
The SIT comprises Vijay Vishwas Pant, IAS, Divisional Commissioner, Lucknow; Kiran S, IPS, IG (Range); and Neel Ratan, Special Secretary, Finance. The composition is notable — a senior IAS officer, a senior police officer, and a finance department official — designed to cover the administrative, investigative, and financial dimensions of the probe simultaneously.
The team has been reportedly directed to submit a preliminary report within seven days and a final report within 15 days. That compressed timeline signals that the government recognises the political urgency of the situation — allowing a controversy over donations to the Ram Mandir to fester would be particularly damaging for a BJP government that invested enormous political capital in the temple’s construction and consecration.
The trust has not accepted the allegations. Champat Rai, General Secretary of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, has categorically rejected these claims. Earlier, on June 8, Trust member Mahant Dinendra Das Maharaj also refuted Akhilesh Yadav’s allegations, stressing that all transactions are properly recorded and processed transparently.
But Vinay Katiyar, who had been involved in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, is himself firing accusations against the trust members. Speaking to reporters, he vowed that some of the members running the affairs of the temple will be thrown out in the next two days.
India TV News reported on how the donations are actually processed at the temple: after counting, the money is secured in specially designed boxes and transported to the bank, with representatives of both the trust and the bank present throughout the process, monitored through CCTV surveillance. The temple currently conducts internal audits in response to the controversy, according to the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir Trust, as reported by India TV News.
The Scale of What Is at Stake
The ₹7 crore figure being alleged as missing needs to be seen against the extraordinary scale of donations flowing into the temple. Ram Temple donations have crossed ₹3,000 crore, with approximately ₹396 crore paid as taxes so far. Apart from cash donations, devotees also offer gold, silver, jewellery and other valuable items at the temple, whose assessment and processing is handled by the Security Printing and Minting Corporation of India Limited, a Government of India undertaking.
The sheer volume creates its own vulnerabilities. India TV News noted that on some occasions, the volume of donations is so high that all the cash cannot be counted on the same day, and uncounted cash is sealed in bags and securely stored until processing is completed. It is precisely in this gap — between receipt and counting — that the alleged irregularities are believed to have occurred.
Political Dimensions
The Ram Mandir is not merely a religious site. It is the BJP’s single most powerful political symbol — the culmination of a decades-long campaign that defined the party’s rise to national dominance. Any suggestion that donations entrusted by crores of devotees worldwide have been misappropriated strikes at the moral foundation of that political project.
Opposition leaders, including AAP’s Sanjay Singh and Akhilesh Yadav, have framed the Ram Mandir donation controversy as a matter of public trust, not just finance, demanding full transparency in the management, accounting, and monitoring of the donation funds. By framing it in those terms — public trust rather than partisan point-scoring — the opposition has found a pressure point that is difficult for the BJP to deflect on ideological grounds alone.
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