In a corner of a dusty village near Ahmedabad, a temple stands out as an unusual project. It’s being built by a low-caste woman, Pintooben.

She is the sarpanch of Rahemalpur village, and is using her personal savings for the construction of the new shrine dedicated to Lord Shiva.

As she walks through the winding lanes of Rahemalpur to show the temple to India Today TV's special investigation team, the middle-aged woman stops short of climbing its unpainted steps.

Pintooben is spending her own money to build her village a temple, but says people would object if she set foot in it because of her caste

Like numerous other fellow Dalits excluded from religion in Gujarat, Pintooben is not allowed to enter the sanctum of any Hindu house of worship.

Custodians of the mainstream religion have drawn the boundaries for her and other low-caste worshippers.

After villagers demanded a new temple at Rahemalpur, the Dalit sarpanch generously sponsored its construction. She says she has so far spent Rs 10 lakh to build the holy place.

“It’s my own money, not the panchayat’s,” she says.

The sarpanch earns her living from selling the produce from her 35-bhiga land.

“I was asked (by the people) to build it, so I gave the money for its construction,” adds Pintooben.

She speaks of "internal divinity" in her conversation with undercover reporters, because she’s aware that religion bars her from physically showing up at sacred sites.

When asked, “You are spending so much, wouldn’t you like to step into the temple?”, she says, “I’d like to, but there’s opposition. There can be a ruckus. One among 100 may be there to object and say the temple has been defiled, the god has been defiled.”

Pintooben summed up the fears of Gujarat’s Dalit community, who are socially banned from regular religious practices.

Last month, four low-caste men were stripped, humiliated, and beaten with belts and rods for skinning a dead cow.

India Today TV’s investigative crew found that the anti-Dalit discrimination ran much deeper in the land of the father of the nation. The team observed that untouchability, outlawed after independence, remains sanctified by religion. Almost all temples there nurse the ancient notions of purity and pollution, the bedrock of untouchability.

Hindu temples were found to be shunning Dalits brazenly to preserve the so-called piety of the faith’s upper-caste elders.

“You are welcome if you want to come in, but these men can’t go inside,” warns the priest of a Kali temple at Kota village in Gandhinagar, as he segregates upper-caste worshippers from the low caste.

Even at big, touristy shrines like the Swami Narayan Nutan Mandir at Kotha in Gandhinagar, Dalits are treated as outcasts

The priests refuse to touch them. “Will you not even give them the tilaks?” asks an undercover India Today reporter. “They’ll do it with their own hands. None of us does that,” replies the priest.

Between the doorway and the gods stands a firewall that Dalits can’t cross. They can’t even partake of prasad with others.

This ostracism is drawn from a wretched, antiquated belief that stigmatises Dalits as a burdensome contamination, and exalts their isolation as purification.

“If they sit where they are sitting now (which is outside of the sanctum), we do nothing. But if they come inside, we’ll purify it with the holy water from the Ganga,” explains a temple caretaker, outlining age-old prejudices that label these people as contagiously toxic.

Even at big, touristy shrines like the Swami Narayan Nutan Mandir at Kotha in Gandhinagar, they are outcasts. At the famous Nag temple at Unava in Gandhinagar, Dalit devotees recoil inside their designated borderlines.

Temple seniors here justify the Dalit prohibition, citing their own convoluted theories on karma.

“They are prohibited. ... It’s their karma,” argues a Nag temple caretaker. “God has prohibited them (from entering), not us. ...This is his (god’s) ban,” he insists.

At another temple dedicated to Lord Ram, at Sadra in Mehsana, the priest blatantly displays upper-caste supremacy over faith, saying he’s well within his rights to deny entry to Dalits.