25,868 acres of Tamil Nadu temple lands worth around Rs 10,000 crore are encroached!

Tamil Nadu State government, which had undertaken a humongous task of digitalizing all land records of temples under the government control of the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) department of the Tamil Nadu government, had found that at least 25,868 acres of land worth around Rs 10,000 crore that belongs to many temples across the state is under encroachment.

Officials had shockingly made a finding that that in various
temples, temple properties are ‘wrongly’ registered in the names of individuals
who had the same names of the temple deity.

For example, a part of land that belongs to the famous Kapaleeswarar
temple in Mylapore in Chennai, was encroached by a person named Kapali, a man
having same name as the temple deity. An individual named Parthsarathy,
encroached a plot of land owned by the Parthasarathy temple, and many Mariamman
temples in the state are encroached people named Mariammals.

Details about this shocking encroachment came to limelight
during an assessment that was carried out for the digitization of land records
of temples and after having a reconfirmation with temples that owned the
encroached parcels of land. The Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments had filed
cases in various courts to reclaim ownership.

“A total of
674.40 acres of land belonging to 156 temples has been recovered, and at least
recovered. Several properties were registered in the names of individuals, who
had taken on the names of the temples or their presiding deities. Now, we are
in the process of reclaiming all this land. A total 6,847.26 acres of land
belonging to 1,466 temples is still to reclaimed,” said an official. Currently,
66% of the work has been completed. The remaining work pertains to cases
pending in the courts” said an official to Times of India.