Recently, a well-known Shirdi Sai Baba shrine located in the district of Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, received an accumulated sum of Rs 401 crore in cash along with 36 kg of gold for the year 2011. Apparently, this is not great news for the shrine, which receives huge donations. In 2010, it had received Rs 322 crore, reported PTI. The donation received in 2011 was Rs 79 crores more than what the temple received in 2010.

With this kind of donations and charity money, the Shirdi temple is one of the richest temples in India, and its investment runs into more than Rs. 427 crores, as per the temple documents., including gold and silver worth crores.

But it’s not the only temple in India that receives such high donations in cash and kind. Other temples such as Tirupati temple, Siddhivinayak temple, Golden temple, and Mata Vaishno Devi also find a mention when we talk about richest temples in India.

The Tirupati temple, also known as the Vatican of the East, has a deity dressed in around 1000 kgs of gold. One wonders how much the deity weighs.  Mata Vaishno Devi Temple, which is always in the news for the huge turnout of pilgrims who visit it every year, has a yearly earning of Rs 500 crore. The Siddhivinayak temple, located in Mumbai, has an annual income of Rs 46 crores from donations.

There are many Hindu temples outside India that also attract large sums of donations. There’s Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Toronto, Canada, which opened in 2007, and utilized USD40 million in construction. The Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in London is considered to be the first traditional Hindu Mandir in Europe.

In a poor country like India religious donations run into crores of rupees every year, yet millions go without food right in front of such temples and depend on alms and charity of those who visit the temples.