How Rs2.5 billion Tirupati laddu scam shook faith in India’s wealthiest temple

Dubai: For centuries, the golden-brown Srivari laddu from the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) temple has symbolised purity, faith and divine blessing.

Devotees from around the world carry it home as sacred prasadam, believing that a bite carries the deity’s grace itself.

But between 2019 and 2024, investigators say, that belief was betrayed — with industrial chemicals, palm oil and even traces of animal fat sneaking into the sanctified kitchen of India’s holiest shrine.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has now laid bare what it calls one of the biggest religious food scandals in the country’s history — a Rs250-crore (Rs2.5 billion) fraud involving fake desi ghee (clarified butter) used to prepare the temple’s laddus.

According to Indian media reports, citing the CBI-led Special Investigation Team (SIT), an Uttarakhand-based firm, Bhole Baba Organic Dairy, managed to supply 6.8 million kilos of ghee to the temple trust — despite not procuring a single drop of milk or butter.

Investigators found that Bhole Baba’s “factory” in Bhagawanpur, Uttarakhand, was little more than a shell operation — with falsified ledgers of milk purchases and payments. The ghee, they allege, was nothing but a chemical blend of palm oil, monodiglycerides, and acetic acid ester, masked with colour and aroma.

The SIT’s remand report, filed in a Nellore court, reveals how the dairy’s promoters, Pomil Jain and Vipin Jain, kept the supply lines open even after being blacklisted by TTD in 2022.

They allegedly floated proxy firms — including Tirupati-based Vyshnavi Dairy, Uttar Pradesh’s Mal Ganga Dairy and Tamil Nadu’s AR Dairy Foods — to keep winning tenders and sending adulterated ghee into the temple’s kitchens.

In one startling instance, four tankers of ghee rejected by TTD in July 2024 for being substandard were quietly resupplied through Vyshnavi Dairy. When FSSAI and SIT officials later inspected the AR Dairy plant in Dindigul, they discovered that the tankers never returned there at all — instead diverted to a stone-crushing unit, where they were reportedly “reprocessed” and relabeled before being sent back to the temple.

As investigators dug deeper, the trail led to political circles.

A Rs5 million hawala transaction has reportedly been unearthed linking K. Chinnappanna, the personal assistant to Y.V. Subba Reddy — YSR Congress MP and former TTD Chairman.

Sources allege Chinnappanna took cash payments from Delhi-based hawala agents connected to Premier Agri Foods Pvt Ltd, one of the dairy intermediaries.

The SIT believes these funds were kickbacks tied to contract awards. Chinnappanna was arrested last month; Reddy himself has now been summoned for questioning.

On Wednesday, former TTD Executive Officer A.V. Dharma Reddy appeared before the SIT for the second consecutive day, questioned for nearly nine hours over alleged lapses in supplier verification and quality checks during his tenure.

The SIT — a five-member team appointed by the Supreme Court, including two CBI officers and one official from the Food Safety Authority of India — says 68 lakh kg of adulterated ghee worth Rs250 crore reached the temple between 2019 and 2024.

Alarmingly, this was despite a 2022 report from the Mysuru-based Central Food Technological Research Institute confirming adulteration. Supplies continued for two more years, raising questions of official complicity and negligence.

The Tirumala kitchen, known as the Potu, is among the world’s largest religious kitchens — producing around 300,000 laddus daily using 1,500 kg of ghee, tonnes of sugar and precious dry fruits. The laddus, which hold a Geographical Indication (GI) tag, are not just temple offerings — they are symbols of faith and purity carried by pilgrims across 150 nations.

That’s why the scandal cut deep. When a Gujarat lab found traces of fish oil, beef tallow and lard in samples of ghee from a Tamil Nadu supplier in 2024, outrage spread across Andhra Pradesh and beyond. Political leaders waded in, with N. Chandrababu Naidu accusing the previous Jagan Mohan Reddy government of overseeing “impure offerings.”

The Supreme Court later rebuked attempts to politicise the issue, but the damage was done. Faith, once shaken, is not easily restored.

The SIT is now tracing a vast web of forged tenders, proxy dairies, and financial conduits that allegedly laundered hundreds of crores in adulterated ghee contracts.

With more arrests expected and top officials under scrutiny, what began as a question of food purity has turned into a test of institutional integrity at one of India’s most revered temples.