Another scam rocks Tirumala temple: Rs540 million fake silk dupatta fraud exposed

Dubai: The Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), which manages one of the world’s most revered and richest Hindu temples, has been shaken by a decade-long procurement scandal involving fake silk dupattas worth nearly Rs540 million.

Coming barely a year after the 2024 adulterated laddu ghee controversy, the fresh revelations have deepened concerns about systemic lapses in the temple’s procurement and quality-control mechanisms.

An internal vigilance probe has now found that from 2015 to 2025, the trust was allegedly supplied polyester dupattas while paying premium rates for pure mulberry silk, according to multiple Indian media reports.

What makes the findings even more alarming is that TTD’s tender norms are precise and uncompromising. The dupattas used during the Vedasirvachanam ritual and VIP darshan ceremonies must be woven entirely from pure mulberry silk.

The specifications mandate the use of 20/22 denier mulberry silk yarn for both warp and weft, with a resultant count of at least 31.5 denier. Each piece must also carry “Om Namo Venkatesaya” in Sanskrit on one side and in Telugu on the other, alongside the sacred symbols of Sanku, Chakra, and Namam.

Even the size, weight, border design, colour tone, and finishing standards are clearly defined. A mandatory silk hologram must be affixed to certify that the piece is genuinely made of silk.

However, the vigilance inquiry found that none of these conditions had been met for nearly a decade, an NDTV report said. To confirm the suspicions, officials sent samples from the TTD warehouse in Tirupati and the Vaibhavotsava Mandapam in Tirumala to the Central Silk Board (CSB) laboratories in Bengaluru and Dharmavaram.

Both labs independently certified that the dupattas were 100% polyester, not mulberry silk. The mandatory silk hologram — one of the simplest authenticity checks — was missing from every sample tested.

According to the vigilance findings, the contractor — VRS Export of Nagari and associated firms — supplied dupattas and related cloth worth Rs549.5 million between 2015 and 2025. Market estimates suggest that a polyester shawl costing around Rs350 was billed to TTD at Rs1,300 to Rs1,389 as genuine silk. A recent contract alone involved 15,000 dupattas at these inflated rates.

TTD chairman BR Naidu, who ordered the investigation, acknowledged the scale of the fraud, noting that a product costing a few hundred rupees was being billed at nearly four times the amount. Following the lab confirmations, the trust cancelled all existing tenders with the implicated firm and referred the matter to the Andhra Pradesh Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) for a comprehensive criminal investigation.

The dupatta scandal now sits alongside a troubling pattern of recent controversies at TTD. In 2024, allegations of adulterated ghee used in the iconic laddu prasadam prompted a CBI-supervised SIT investigation into the supply chain.

In 2023, the Parakamani case exposed the theft of hundi offerings by a temple-associated clerk. With each episode, pressure mounts on the trust’s oversight systems and raises urgent questions about how such large-scale lapses persisted within an institution built on public faith and devotional trust.