How faith can fund primary education in India!


India is a country where temples have golden roofs while schools in rural areas have roofs leaking!

Recently I went on a small pilgrimage with family, to Hindu holy towns of Haridwar, Mathura and Vrindavan. One aspect that was strikingly visible was the greed of priests for money citing various reasons and promising welfare for our family, kids and ourselves. At a few temples we visited, they were requesting for donations in the name of God or Goddess! From the time you reach the vicinity of a temple, people selling material for worship and then temples requesting donations and priests requesting donations in exchange of blessings, or for helping you perform ‘pooja’ to please Gods, is a common sight across various popular temples in India. The amount offered at some extremely popular temples runs into hundreds of crores (10 million) annually. Daily collections in all Indian temples may be a few hundred crores! Some of the temples use this money for some welfare activities though there is poor accounting or book keeping at many of these temples except for a few well-governed or regulated ones.

One of the sensible ways to spend this money could be to mandate a half of the collections to be spent on primary education in India. Like the Companies Act mandates corporates to spend 2% of their profits on corporate social responsibility; all temples should be mandated to spend 50% of their collections on funding local primary schools in the same village or town. If this happens, knowing this may actually encourage many of the worshipers to donate more in temples so that their money is used for better primary education. Church seems to be doing well in this area and why not learn from it? State governments have constrained budgets for primary education and this measure can potentially improve the quality of primary education across India, particularly in rural areas. Aren’t schools also temples of Saraswati, Hindu goddess of wisdom?
Location: Nagpur, Maharashtra, India

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