Panel demands one year to count Padmanabha temple wealth

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A special committee, supervising the preparation of inventory of huge wealth recovered from five secret chambers of Padmanabha Swamy temple, in its report submitted to the Supreme Court has sought a year’s time to complete the exercise considering the complex nature of it.

The report has mainly dealt with the issues of expenses to be incurred on preparation of the inventory, maintaining the security of the huge wealth, salary of the employees involved in the exercise and expenses on the videography of the whole process as ordered by the court.

The report has put the total expenses to be incurred on the whole exercise at Rs 2.80 core during the year-long process, claiming that the “public interests” were supreme in upkeep of the wealth recovered from the five Cellars of the shrine.

However, the committee had stated that as per the tradition of the temple 'deva-prashnam' (permission of Lord Padmanaba Swamy) had been conducted about opening of the sixth Cellar-B and it was 'denied'.

The committee, however, said that the Lord though had declined the permission to open Cellar-B but it would abide by the direction of the apex court in this regard.

On Friday, when a bench of Justices R V Raveendran and A K Patnaik disapproved certain actions of the Travancore Royal family, which is the custodian of the temple, the judges had directed to make the copies of the report available to the parties to the case and the same were duly supplied on Monday by the counsel for the panel.