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BT DOTCOM: COVER STORY The Wires of God In these glum times, religion is a rare growth industry. Flooded with money and thronged by devotees, religious institutions find the silicon gods a great help in managing their multi-crore affairs. By Vinod Mahanta
Just below the tabya, the sanctum sanctorum of the Bangla Sahib Gurudwara in central Delhi, Gurudev Singh sits crosslegged-with an IBM Net Vista PC keyboard in his lap. Amid the kirtans and bustle of devotees circling the Granth Sahib, he quietly receives donations, keys in the amount and gives people computer-generated receipts. Gurudev is one of the 12 pc operators at the Bangla Sahib, whose computer network stretches across the six prasad counters, langar donation, ration store, library and tabya. A record of each donation in thus logged into the gurudwara's network and is instantly available to its trustees and accountants. ''The online system has brought in greater transparency, curbed corruption, increased speed of work, besides cutting down cost of stationary drastically,'' says Kulmohan Singh, General Secretary, Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee. The entire data is captured at the point of origin in the four gurudwaras run by the committee-the others are Rakabganj, Nanak Piao, and Sis Ganj-and at 9.30 p.m. every day, it is uploaded to the central server at Rakabganj.
Religion is the one growth sector across a glum world. In religious India, temples, gurudwaras, mosques, and churches are seeing increasing numbers of devotees. These devotees contribute increasing amounts of money. In size, complexity, and resources, the challenges of running a religious institution, already formidable, are increasing by the day. And so the keepers of the Gods are finding there is no better way than to wire up. Transparency. Ease of reporting. Inventory management. Fleet management. Human resource and payroll management. Accounts consolidation. These are just some of the terms you will hear from the devout managing committee at the Bangla Sahib Gurudwara. BT checked out two other institutions with similar systems, the Siddhi Vinayak temple in Mumbai, and the biggest of them all, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams in Andhra Pradesh. The Problems of Plenty Last year, Bangla Sahib was finding it increasingly difficult to manage its substantial assets and cash (receipts for 2000-01 were Rs 32 crore). Frequent changes in management created further problems. That's when it decided to wire up and build a system that was largely isolated from the vagaries of management. The gurudwara's system went online on July 1, 2001. Siddhi Vinayak temple has 15 computer terminals that are interconnected on a local network. It also has its own interactive website that not only provides information about temple timings, social functions, and special occasions, and hosts a virtual store but even allows ICICI Bank account holders to donate money online. Siddhi Vinayak in the heart of Mumbai was struggling with plentiful donations: up to Rs 8 lakh a week. Receipts were made manually and accounts had to be similarly tallied at the end of the day. The adoption of technology was inevitable because the logistics were becoming too difficult to handle manually, explains Executive Officer Sanjay Bhagwat. ''One of the biggest requirements was the number of poojas that need to be performed,'' he says. Some 10 types of specialised poojas need to be performed, many on behalf of the devotee by the poojari. "Let's say there are seven poojas that need to be done at different dates in a year," says Bhagwat. "Keeping track of that on behalf of the thousands who flock to the temple every day was very difficult.''
Today as the money is collected, the name and the gotra of the devotee and the kind of pooja needed is entered online. This information is stored centrally and every day poojaris instantly get a list of the day's poojas. After the poojas, a packet of prasad is also dispatched to the devotees. Gurudev in Bangla Sahib has similar real-time reports of special devotee requirements at a touch of the button. Cheating the Gods is now that much more difficult. Recently, workers at one gurudwara had modified receipts, but when the receipts were tallied with reports on back-up systems, a shortfall of Rs 1.5 lakh was immediately evident. The culprits were caught and forced to return the amount. "People are now proud," says Kulmohan Singh. "They now feel the community has taken a step in the right direction.'' The gurudwara committee received Rs 30 lakh in donations since the implementation of the online initiative on July 1, 2001. Kulmohan says the cost of wiring up, Rs 1.25 crore, will be recovered over the next four months. The cost is not really an issue with cash-rich religious institutions. It's more about will. In any case, computer firms are keen to be associated with places that attract so many people. Delhi's gurudwaras got their hardware from IBM at a substantial discount. At Tirupati, it has become a part of every department's functioning. There is no separate it department. The temple's once-endless queues are managed by giving devotees a barcoded wristband with the time of darshan imprinted. A Bangalore company, bna Technologies, devised the system, which has been so successful at streamlining the daily flow of 45,000 devotees, that the Gas Authority of India is testing it as a solution to deal with the long queues at CNG fuelling stations in Delhi. The solution being to provide barcoded tokens to CNG vehicles in the capital. Meeting God Online It is perhaps at the front end that the new wired structures are becoming apparent: offering donations and making reservations for poojas and trips. Tirupati is tying up with Citibank to launch an e-hundi, a payment gateway that will allow millions of non-resident devotees to simply log on and make contributions. At the peak of the dotcom boom, some websites frequently offered online poojas. You can still select a temple and a conduct a pooja online. Blessingsonthenet.com, a Mumbai portal, has arrangements with trusts of 21 temples, from the Jagannath temple to Badrinath. Online donations are transferred directly to these trusts by the payment gateway operators (ICICI and Easynet). Of course, this is also a scamster opportunity. Kerala's famous Guruvayoor temple is planning to take legal action against a website that offered prasad on its behalf. Through www.sgpc.net, the website of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandhak Committee, devotees can make online reservations to visit the holiest Sikh shrine, Shri Harmandir Sahib, or the Golden Temple as it is popularly known, in Amritsar. You can book for an akhandpath at not just Harmandir Sahib but other eminent gurudwaras too. The Siddhi Vinayak temple has gone one step further. Last year the festival of Angarika Sankashti was webcast, and there are now plans for a live broadcast and webcast of its Tuesday prayers. Social projects run by religious trusts have benefited too. Siddhi Vinayak temple provides medical aid to needy patients, receiving about 400 applications that require an average outlay of Rs 10,000 per month. Clearance time for this has now been cut in half, from a month to 15 days. The Delhi Gurudwara Committee, which also manages four colleges, 12 public schools, and provides aid to five other schools, has now connected them to its system: the educational institutions update management information every day and relay it to the central server in the Rakabganj gurudwara. Access to God will only get more wired. The Gurudwara committee is in the process of linking its entire computer system to its websites, dsgpc.com, and dsgpc.net. Tirupati's online services will likely start off next month. Siddhi Vinayak temple plans to link up with Skumars.com and utilise its network of 542 retail outlets to book and distribute prasad packages worth Rs 51, Rs 151 and Rs 251. Welcome to God.com. additional reporting by Abir Pal & E. Kumar Sharma |
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