Should State govt crack its whip on Endowment Department's functioning?

Hyderabad: Is it high time that the Telangana State government cracks its whip on the facade of successive governments and the State Endowment Department's functioning? Prevent the Endowment Department from taking unilateral decisions to start institutions and schools without prior notification and the community's participation and consent to justify its role as a trustee? Shun an inherited colonial administrative setup of administration ofHindu temples and assets from the British to the United Andhra Pradesh, then to Telangana?

These questions arise following the decision at a recent meeting on the Vemulawada Temple development, in which, the Endowment Department was asked to prepare plans to establish a Vedic School.

However, sources say that there is no reason, purpose or objective identified for starting a Vedic school. What immediate, short-term, and long-term, objectives are defined and deliberated and how the proposed school should evolve, into the future.

When queried sources in the State Endowment Department said, "Any proposal to establish a Vedic School is meant to encourage the learning of different branches of the Vedas. Also, different practices related to the performance of rituals and the like. This has been the standard template being followed, since the days of United Andhra Pradesh under the Endowment Department,” the sources added.

Inquiries revealed that typically the way it had functioned under a Revenue Board in the Colonial British era, the Commissioner of the endowments functions under the closer watch of the State Revenue Department, even after 75 years of the British left the country.

Also, the department does not even have a dedicated research wing on Hindu studies, which the department deals with, on a day-to-day basis. Passing the State service commission examination is taken for granted as a hallmark of qualification for running the temple administration which embodies thousands of years of tradition, culture and heritage. Other than those engaged in the sacred part of the affairs of the temple, the majority of the staff engaged in the secular administration of the Hindu temple administration are either unqualified or under qualified in any of the branches of Hindu studies, temple traditions, architecture and construction engineering, schools of sculpture, culture and a host of other study verticals woven around the evolution of temples.

There is hardly anything that the department showed that it can think out-of-the-box other than engaging in a range of activities. They include construction activity for pilgrim amenities, hiking and raising paid Sava services to the deity, launching new schemes to collect more funds, and encouraging more pilgrims’ flow which has been bringing more revenue into the department's coffers.

The lack of out-of-the-box thinking in the Endowment Department in its role of trusteeship from the top-to-bottom exposes that the existing administrative structure is redundant, obsolete and outdated.

For example, early on, a team of officials from Estonia came to Hyderabad and a team of officials from the Telangana Council of Higher Education (TGHE) visited Estonia. This was to explore collaboration for education and research in the cyber security area.

However, the University of Tartu in the same country has been the centre of Hindu studies for more than 200 years.

Why are foreign universities like the University of Tartu, and those across Europe and the West studying Hindu studies under various labels? Why have studies and research been carried out in Europe and the West on schools of thought like Nyaya-Vaiseshika, and other linguistic schools that constitute part of Hindu traditions?

For example, Section 30 of the Telangana Charitable and Hindu Religious Institutions and Endowments Act, 1987, defines, "Any reference to Hindu shall be construed as including a reference to a person professing Buddhist, Jain, or Sikh religion, and the reference to Hindu religious institutions shall be construed accordingly."

However, since the formation of Telangana, the State Endowment Department has not spent or supported even a single rupee on any activity like publishing books, launching research journals to highlight the contribution of the impact of Acharya Nagarjuna, or any others to the schools of linguistics, studies in consciousness and perception, cognitive studies and a host of others having contemporary relevance in the fields like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Language Models development needed for the Certification Intelligence (AI). When others have been studying Hindu studies and thousands of years of their religious, cultural and intellectual repositories, and their contemporary relevance: Why did the Hindu Religious Endowments Department not establish institutions for the people of that religious traditions with the revenues earned from their temples to study what was theirs remains a million-dollar

question.