The Siddhivinayak temple is among the most visited temples in Mumbai and lakhs of devotees visit this temple every month. Although donations have been in the style of cash and gold among other items, now the temple trust will permit devotees to donate in the form of equity shares too.
“Devotees can now donate to the temple in the form of shares through this facility. This will help in raising the temple’s revenue, which will be used for the social cause,” said Narendra Rane, chairman, Shree Siddhivinayak Ganapati Temple Trust.
The temple trust has bound with SBICAP Securities and opened up a Demat account, which will allow its devotees to present shares of organizations too, as donations.
Anybody can donate shares of listed companies digitally via a Demat account. This effort will be later prolonged to other financial instruments, such as mutual funds, bonds, and gold exchange traded funds.
“We are positioning this as a new initiative to devotees,” said Mani Palvesan, MD of SBICAP Securities.
The temple had previously received shares in the donation, but many of them couldn’t be transformed to cash due to signature proof issues, Palvesan added.
The Siddhivinayak temple currently gets donations of about Rs 75 crore in cash and kind yearly. It has deposited 44 kg of gold under the government’s gold monetization scheme introduced in November last year.
Last year, managing body of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam, also started this type of facility last year.
