Every day, thousands of devotees travel to Ayodhya to visit the Ram Mandir. Each of them comes with a simple belief: that the money they place in the donation box will go straight to the deity.
How the Trust Was Formed
On 9 November 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of building the Ram Mandir. It also ordered that a trust be set up to handle the construction and manage the money — pretty standard, similar to how other big temples like Vaishno Devi, Shirdi Sai Baba, and Tirupati are run. Normally, the state government keeps an eye on these trusts, and anyone can file an RTI (Right to Information request) to check how the donations are being used.
But this trust was exceptional. When the BJP government officially set it up on 5 February 2020 — calling it Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra — they made it “autonomous.” That meant it would run like a private trust, with no real government control over it. Except 12 out of its 15 members were still handpicked by the same government, and most of them had strong BJP, RSS, or VHP connections.
A few names worth knowing: Nripendra Misra, who had been PM Modi’s principal secretary from 2014 to 2019; Champat Rai, a lifelong RSS man who later became the VHP’s international vice president and was made the trust’s general secretary; Kameshwar Chowpal, a former BJP MLC on the construction committee; and Dr. Anil Mishra, a former RSS regional officer put in charge of buying and selling — his office was right next to where the donations were counted.
Because the trust was “autonomous,” it was outside the reach of the RTI Act. Even RSS members who filed RTIs asking how the money was being spent got turned down, with the government confirming the trust didn’t have to answer. So basically: the public could give money, but not enquire where it went.
A Warning Nobody Listened To
Seven months after the trust was formed, its own leaders hired a private firm to audit its accounts. According to the Indian Express, the auditors were alarmed — they called the financial management “highly unprofessional,” said there was no proper record-keeping, and pointed out that money was moving around without anyone double-checking it. Their warning was blunt: fix this now, or theft and fraud are inevitable.
The report was quietly ignored. No rules, no checks, nothing changed.
Around this time, a construction engineer named Dinanath Verma noticed something — the bill for aluminium work was inflated by 1.5 times. When he asked the contractor about it, he was told the extra money was going toward a 40% commission for Dr. Anil Mishra. Verma pushed back — but in vain. His payments were stopped, and he was removed from his job. He later said (and this was reported by ANI and Newsgram) that he was even threatened with his life. At the time, none of this made headlines. It just got swept under the rug.
The Temple Opens, and the Money Starts Pouring In
The Ram Mandir finally opened to the public on 23 January 2024. From day one, donations came flooding in — Rs. 8 to 13 lakhs a day on average, and up to Rs. 50-60 lakhs during festivals. To handle this volume of cash, the trust set up automatic counting machines, computerized receipts, extra donation boxes, and eventually a whole secure counting facility 200 metres away from the temple, watched over by CCTV.
The trust also signed an agreement with the State Bank of India (SBI), putting SBI officers in charge of supervising how the money was collected, counted, and deposited. The plan was for SBI to hire staff through proper interviews, based on qualifications.
According to the Hindustan Times, SBI was pressured into hiring people the trustees personally recommended — not the most qualified candidates. Two names close to Champat Rai, Ratnesh Chaturvedi and Gagandeep Singh, joined the team handling donations. Security and cash handling were outsourced to a firm called Sainik Security Services, and instead of proper hiring, local Ayodhya residents were brought in based on who they knew.
And here’s the thing — almost everyone hired was connected to each other. Manish Yadav was the nephew of Champat Rai’s own driver. Anukalp Mishra was the brother-in-law of Lavkush Mishra, and both were related to trust member Anil Mishra. Ramashankar, better known as Tinnu Yadav, was Champat Rai’s personal driver and ended up being one of the most powerful people in the temple — handling VIP visits, holding keys to the strong room, overseeing cash counting, all of it. Most of these people earned somewhere between Rs. 12,000 and Rs. 22,000 a month.
Inside the Counting Room
Here’s how the system was supposed to work: donation boxes were opened in front of trust and bank representatives, the cash went into a locked iron box, and it was carried 200 meters to the counting room in the basement of a nearby building. A radio maintenance officer named Arjun Dev controlled the CCTV watching over it all — he was in charge of around 1,600 cameras across the whole temple complex.
Counting happened in two shifts, 8 am to 2 pm and 2 pm to 8 pm, with about 50 people in the room each time. Of these, 24 actually counted the cash (all hired through Sainik Security Services, but really chosen by the trustees), 12 people from the trust kept watch, and 14 came from SBI and the audit team. Workers weren’t allowed to leave the room except to use the washroom next door.
And Then the Stealing Began
The workers already knew exactly where the main cameras were pointed, and being locals who all knew each other, they started working together — deliberately blocking certain camera angles. They’d slip a bundle of Rs. 500 notes into their pockets, hide it in the washroom under the excuse of a bathroom break (this detail comes from an NDTV report), and collect it at the end of the shift to split among themselves. For a long time, nobody caught on.
By early 2025, some trust officials started noticing that fewer Rs. 500 bundles were showing up than expected, and got suspicious. So they teamed up with SBI to set new rules: no pockets in the uniforms, extra security guards in the room, random checks, and — importantly — CCTV footage had to be saved for at least 180 days.
None of it was actually followed. People kept wearing regular clothes. Instead of 180 days of footage, only 45 days were kept — the rest got deleted. Nobody was searched on their way out.
But with the old pocket trick getting harder to pull off, the group came up with something smarter. When a donation box was opened, all the mixed-up notes — tens, fifties, five-hundreds — were sorted and bundled into stacks of 100 to make counting easier. Except now, instead of putting exactly 100 notes in a bundle, they’d slip in 120. So a bundle that should have held Rs. 50,000 (100 notes of Rs. 500) actually held Rs. 60,000 — but the voucher written up for it (allegedly prepared by Anukalp Mishra) still said Rs. 50,000. Since counting was done bundle by bundle, nobody noticed the extra notes hiding inside.
These bundles were then taken to the bank by staff members — reportedly Ratnesh, Gagandeep, and Tinnu Yadav — who would quietly pull out the extra 20 notes before depositing the money, so the numbers matched perfectly on paper. Afterward, they’d meet up somewhere and split the skimmed cash. This apparently went on, day after day, for months.
By March 2026, SBI noticed something was off and formally told the trust in writing to replace the counting staff. Anil Mishra and Champat Rai simply said no. The same people kept working.
The Hidden Camera That Blew It Open
With SBI unable to force any changes, some officials decided to act on their own. At the end of May 2026, they secretly installed a hidden camera in the counting room — on top of the ones everyone already knew about. On 4 June 2026, they sat down to watch a week’s worth of footage.
What they saw shocked them. Workers were deliberately standing in front of the visible cameras while others hid cash bundles in their clothes right behind them. Avinash Shukla appeared to be at the center of it all.
The very next day, 5 June 2026, police and trust officials showed up at Avinash Shukla’s house. This was a man earning Rs. 20,000-22,000 a month — yet his home turned up foreign currency (notes from $1 to $100, likely from foreign donors) and Rs. 20,39,220 in cash. All together, around Rs. 58 lakhs worth of stuff was seized. He was arrested — though, oddly, no official FIR was filed at that point.
It also turned out that several people involved had been living way beyond their salaries. Lavkush Mishra, who earned Rs. 12,000 a month, had reportedly spent Rs. 25 lakhs building a two-storey house.
The Story Gets Out
Two days after the hidden camera revelation, one of the temple staff members — apparently someone who’d been left out of the theft — went to Samajwadi Party leader Pawan Pandey with the whole story. Party chief Akhilesh Yadav tweeted about it, and within a single day, it was national news.
At first, Champat Rai tried to play it down, saying audits happen all the time and there was nothing to worry about.
But within the week, a former accounts in-charge named Mahipal Singh came forward with more. He said theft had actually been going on since 2020-21, back when he worked there. He explained that because of the crowds, many devotees couldn’t reach the trust office to hand over gold and silver jewellery directly, so they’d just drop it in the donation box instead. According to him, Tinnu Yadav used to photograph the donated jewellery and send the pictures to Champat Rai. He also said he personally saw ten chests full of silver jewellery taken away with no receipt, no record. When he raised it, he was fired.
Around the same time, former BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh claimed he had detailed proof of the theft and misuse of donations — but said he wouldn’t hand it over because too many powerful people were involved.
The State Steps In
On 13 June 2026, UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to look into the whole mess. The team headed to Ayodhya and started questioning more than 40 people.
Right away, they searched the washroom next to the counting room and found Rs. 2.5 lakh in cash hidden there — something was very wrong. Next, they went after the CCTV footage, and found that seven to eight months of it had been deleted, even though the rule said 180 days had to be saved.
Investigators also went looking for Arjun Dev, the man who’d controlled the temple’s 1,600 cameras, surviving multiple attempts to get him transferred elsewhere. The moment the SIT showed up, he was already transferred — to Gorakhpur. By then, WhatsApp chats had been wiped and phones had been formatted, wiping out most of the digital trail.
The raids uncovered the following:
- Tinnu Yadav — who used to drive an auto-rickshaw and whose father sold tea — was found with jewellery, cash, and property papers worth roughly Rs. 50 crores. That included a 70-room hostel near the airport, a stake in a restaurant, and an SUV.
- Manish Yadav — his nephew, had Rs. 36 lakhs in cash.
- Lavkush Mishra — a former car mechanic, had Rs. 10 lakhs stashed in a heap of cow dung — on top of the house he was already building.
- Anukalp Mishra — had bought a farmhouse.
- KD Tiwari — who managed the temple’s gold and silver donations, had bought land worth Rs. 1.5 crores.
On 23 June, the SIT handed in its first report — to Additional Chief Secretary Sanjay Prasad. There’s just one problem: Sanjay Prasad is also listed as a member of the trust. So the body being investigated was essentially receiving its own investigation report.
Two days later, on 25 June 2026, trust member Krishna Mohan filed an FIR naming eight people, including Avinash Shukla, Anukalp Mishra, Lavkush Mishra, and Manish Yadav. All of them were arrested. Once in custody, Avinash Shukla reportedly told police that Dr. Anil Mishra had been running the whole operation with the help of around 100 people.
This caused an uproar. Opposition leaders said only the small players were being punished while the powerful people behind them walked free. Santosh Dubey, who had himself been part of the original Ram Janmabhoomi movement, openly accused Champat Rai and Anil Mishra of being the real thieves, and predicted the SIT would end up going soft on them.
A Second Scandal: The Land Deals
On the same day the FIR was filed, AAP leader Sanjay Singh handed the SIT documents relating to 11 land purchases made by the trust — opening up a whole new front in the scandal.
Back in 2021, the trust had run a fundraising campaign called the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir Nidhi Samarpan Abhiyan, collecting around Rs. 1,511 crores from devotees in under a month, partly meant for buying land around the temple. A five-member committee was supposed to decide on these purchases.
Some of these deals are hard to explain away:
- In May 2021, the trust bought land from Deep Narayan, the nephew of Ayodhya’s mayor. Narayan had bought that same land only two and a half months earlier for Rs. 20 lakhs — and sold it to the trust for Rs. 2.5 crores.
- Land bought by Ravi Mohan Tiwari and Sultan Ansari for Rs. 2 crores was resold to the trust just ten minutes later — for Rs. 18.5 crores.
- The trust bought land from Harish Pathak and his wife Kusum, who had actually been declared fugitives by the courts since 2018 over charges of theft, fraud, and forgery.
- A sitting BJP MLA bought land from a local priest for Rs. 20 lakhs and flipped it to the trust for Rs. 2.5 crores.
Local priests had apparently been complaining about deals like these for a while, but nobody looked into it.
The Missing Silver — and Possibly Fake Jewellery
There’s also a separate thread involving precious metal donations. On 26 January 2021, members of the Vishwa Sindhi Seva Sangam handed Champat Rai 200 silver bricks — 1 kg each, 200 kg total — meant for the temple’s construction. They were told a receipt would follow once the purity of the silver was checked. That receipt never came, and nobody knows where the bricks ended up.
A businessman in Mumbai told investigators he’d donated a 3 kg silver necklace and 1 kg of silver footwear for the idol, handed directly to Tinnu Yadav — and never got a receipt either. Plenty of devotees who donated jewellery — necklaces, earrings, nose rings — have no paperwork proving they ever gave it at all, since much of it was reportedly stolen straight from the donation boxes before it was ever logged. Investigators are now checking whether the jewellery actually offered to the deity might have been swapped out for fakes.
Where This Leaves Things
Two separate warnings — one in 2020, another in 2025 — flagged exactly this kind of theft, and were ignored. And behind the drivers, nephews, and relatives named in the FIR so far, it’s hard to believe they pulled off something this big entirely on their own. Figuring out who was really calling the shots matters.