Temples take tech to tackle tugs

NEW DELHI: God helps those who help themselves. Some of the country's richest and busiest temple shrines are installing terminals of online commodity exchanges to break cartels of profiteering traders that sell them foodgrains, cooking oils and spices worth hundreds of crores every year. The biggest temple of modern India, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD) is leading from the front.It became the first to start hedging its bets by daily scrolling through live prices from NMCE, MCX and NCDEX a fortnight ago. Others, like the Golden Temple in Amritsar and the Guruvayoor shrine in Kerala, may follow shortly. Most Indian shrines have large kitchens for free feeding devotees. That makes them large buyers of food staples, grains, spices and edible oils. As the volumes are large and the shrines wealthy, there is usually a cartel of traders that supplies to them through fixed contracts. As the temple managements rarely have any independent access to price forecasts, they are usually pushed into overpriced contracts. But access to future prices on online exchanges can easily put a stop to that. Take Tirupati, the shrine that could give the Vatican a run for its money. TTD spends Rs 300 crore every year as the biggest single buyer of rice, edible oils, gur and sugar, cardamom, rice, cashew, turmeric, edible oil, vegetables and jaggery.