india

Updated: Jun 20, 2019 17:37 IST

Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), the trust which manages the country’s richest temple of Lord Venkateshwara at Tirumala in Andhra Pradesh’s Chittoor district, will have a new trust board soon.

The chairman of the trust and senior Telugu Desam Party (TDP) leader Putta Sudhakar Yadav resigned on Wednesday. Yadav sent his resignation letter to TTD executive officer Anil Kumar Singhal. The remaining 16 members of the board, including popular social worker Sudha Narayana Murthy, wife of Infosys founder-chairman Narayana Murthy, resigned from their posts in the last couple of weeks.

The resignation of Yadav and other board members was necessitated in the wake of the defeat of the TDP in the recent assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh. All board members were appointed by then Andhra CM Chandrababu Naidu in April 2018 for a period of two years.

Yadav had been refusing to step down on the grounds that his was not a political appointment. “If the new government wants to abolish the board, I will resign,” he had said.

But, on Wednesday, he was forced to resign from the post hours after the announcement made by endowments minister Vellampalli Srinivas in Tirumala that the Jagan Mohan Reddy government would promulgate an ordinance to abolish the existing trust board and appoint a new one.

A YSR Congress party leader said senior party leader and former Ongole MP Y V Subba Reddy has been finalised as the next chairman of the TTD trust board along with the other board members. “Orders to this effect will be issued in a day or two,” he said.

Subba Reddy’s name as the TTD chairman has been doing rounds for the last two weeks. The speculations on his appointment also triggered a debate in the social media over his religious faith. Subba Reddy is Jagan Reddy’s uncle, he is brother-in-law of Jagan’s mother Vijayalakshmi. Netizens argued that since Jagan is devout Christian, his uncle also must be a Christian.

Noted writer and academic Madhu Kishwar tweeted saying Subba Reddy’s actual name was Yehova Vincent Reddy and wondered how an evangelist could be made the TTD trust board chairman. But Subba Reddy clarified that he is a devout Hindu and was not a Christian. He said he regularly worshipped Hindu gods, cows and took Ayyappa deeksha.

The TTD chairman post is considered to be highly prestigious and there has always been intense competition and lobbying for it. This is mostly because of the sentiment attached to the temple apart from the powers to have control over the massive wealth of the trust.

The annual revenue of the TTD as per 2019-20 estimates is around Rs 3,116 crore, including Rs 1,231 crore from cash offerings from devotees. The overall wealth, including gold and silver jewellery and other properties, is more than Rs 56,000 crore, as per the 2010 estimates.