Even though Tirumal Tirupati Devastanams (TTD) is the best run temple trust in the country, the management of lakhs of pilgrims, who visit Hills everyday and donors remains far from satisfaction- despite huge financial resources at its command. VIP menace has become necessary evil for Lord Balaji. Without VIPs everything would collapse at Tirumala-because constitution of the management board itself is a political affair and the post of Chairman is always filled with a ruling party leader. Normally it’s given as a gift to the loyal leader of the ruling party’s commander. Not a day passes without ordinary pilgrims raising voice against the VIP menace.
Without touching the VIP aspect, the TTD wants to manage the affairs Lord Balaji smoothly by digitizing the services. The TTD is roping in the services of Tata Consultancy (TCS) Services. In tune with the time, TTD-TCS combine is planning to build ‘Digital Tirumala’ in order to satisfy the ever-increasing pilgrims and donors. TTD EO Dr D Sambasivarao and TCS CEO Chadrasekharan discussed the project of Digital Tirumala. All ongoing IT projects initiated by TTD will become part of the new project. TCS is offering its services as its contribution to Tirumala under corporate social responsibility. According to EO Dr Rao, TTD wants to deploy the digital technology to the best possible extent specially in the areas of darshan, accommodation, laddu prasadam distribution etc in view of the pilgrims flow to Tirumala temple which is incredibly increasing year after year. These areas that always bring disrepute to the TTD, in spite of the presence able administrators like Dr Sambasivarao.
”In the last one year, with the help of TCS, we have made significant improvement in darshan and accommodation by deploying the best-in class systems. The on-line booking of Rs.300, arjitha seva tickets, accommodation, e-Hundi, Dmat, e-books are just few to mention. But still there is a long way to go and need to integrate the system by developing a next gen application,” Rao said.
Chandrasekharan said that TCS feels it as a great privilege to work with TTD in developing an IT application to improve services to the satisfaction of pilgrims. “There is need to develop an application to integrate Donor Management System. Apart from this we should focus on integrating everything. Our team is also working on Srivari Seva on-line application. This we will achieve by sketching out a specific time frame”, he added.
