8,600 Archakas not paid salaries for months in Telangana, plan ‘chalo secretariat’; defer at Govt request

HYDERABAD: Around 2,200 archakas in midsize temples run by the endowments department and 6,441 archakas under the ‘Dhupa Deepa Naivaidya’ (DDN) single priest scheme were not paid salaries from the past few months.

After repeated requests with the Endowments Minister Konda Surekha for timely payment of salaries they gave a call for ‘Chalo Secretariat’ on Tuesday. However, V Anil Kumar, Endowment Commissioner sat with the representatives of the temple priests on Monday in Hyderabad and convinced them to postpone their move for a week and assured them that the problem would be sorted out very soon.

“The DDN priests were not paid for more than two months. So, we have declared an action plan and met the Commissioner. Considering that the Government is new and there are issues regarding manual attendance of temple staff, we have agreed to postpone our struggle to next week,” Vasudeva Sharma, President of DDN Archakas Association told NewsTAP on Monday.

Former Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao on May 31, 2023 announced the enhancement of the monthly honorarium of veda and sastra pandits from Rs 2,500 to Rs.5,000 and reduced the eligibility age for beneficiaries of the scheme from 75 to 65 years.

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He made this announcement after inaugurating the ‘Viprahitha Brahmin Sadan’, a community building. He declared that the assistance provided to temples under the DDN programme would be further extended to another 2,796 temples taking the total number to 6,441. Similarly, the monthly payment of Rs 6,000 given to archakas to maintain the temples was enhanced to Rs 10,000.

“ The problem was KCR kept the Archakas monthly payment under grant in aid and naturally the new Government was not able to take up payment of Archakas as first priority like KCR did,” S Rangarajan, Chief Priest of Chilkur Balaji temple pointed out. He said that even though temples have donors who generously shared their wealth for the temple development was not shared between the sibling States at the time of bifurcation, where wakf properties were divided. “Moreover I don’t think that the new Government made any such assurance in the interim budget for the payment of monthly honorarium to archakas,” he said.

Krishnamacharya of the JAC of Archaka Association in Telangana said that they were apprehensive of making an issue out of the non-payment of salaries as the Government was new. “We have submitted to the Government to include us in the E-Kuber system of payment so that we get paid like any other Government employee,” he said adding that manual attendance and its conversion to digital might be the cause of the delay.