The Lord Venkateswara temple here has been registering a constant increase in its hundi income as well as pilgrim crowds for the past week.
There has been a significant increase in the percentage of pilgrims turning up for darshan since August 30, the day major relaxations as part of Unlock 4.0 were announced.
Of the 72,000 tickets made available since then, both paid and free tokens, a record number of 69,090 devotees had the darshan of the deity. There is a considerable drop in the percentage of absentees among the paid darshan ticket holders, which hovered around 18.50% during the initial weeks of reopening of the temple to the public.
In spite of demands to increase the daily quota of darshan tickets, the TTD kept it at 12,000 tickets a day in view of the seriousness of the pandemic. However, it has recently increased its online quota to 10,000 tickets per day.
Meanwhile, the increase in the turnout of pilgrims has also resulted in a spike in the proceeds derived from the temple hundi that has been the main source of income for the TTD for decades.
The hundi offerings stood at a record ₹4.73 crore in the past six days, averaging ₹78.75 lakh a day.
The hundi recorded a constant income during August but for the first week when the proceeds stood at ₹2.85 crore. The hundi income was ₹4.55 crore in the second week and ₹4.59 crore and ₹4.22 crore during the following weeks.
