Visakhapatnam: Devotees at the popular hill shrine of Lord Varaha Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy in Simhachalam have taken Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for cashless transactions seriously and started offering donations by swiping their cards.
The Simhachalam temple board had introduced Point of Sale (PoS) machines at the temple to facilitate purchase of darshan and various special puja tickets a few days ago.
Some devotees have started swiping their cards to offer donations instead of tossing currency notes into the traditional hundi vault. During the week days, nearly 15,000 devotees visit the temple and in normal days around 8,000 visit the shrine from the three districts of north Andhra and parts of Chhattisgarh and Odisha.
Ten days after the demonetisation step was announced, the hundi collection was counted. It has crossed '41.6 lakh. Generally, hundi collections are counted every 28 days. The last time the Hundi collection was counted was mid-November.
Around seven PoS machines were introduced at the temple on December 2 and the devotees have swiped their debit or credit cards for special pujas like Sahasranamavali and Ashotharasathanamavali. Cards were swiped to offer donations of a few thousands of rupees also. Temple authorities named it as e-Hundi to collect donations in cards.
“The donations through either debit or credit cards are in a few thousands as of now, but we are expecting this to go up. Now, devotees need not look for change before they plan a visit to the Simhachalam temple. It also makes our job easy to count the donations,” said a senior official of Simhachalam temple.
The state endowments department has also introduced PoS machines at Annavaram temple in East Godavari and Sri Kanaka Maha Lakshmi temple in Vizag. “We have just got these PoS machines and would start using them in a couple of days. These machines can make the job of devotees easy if they have cards with them instead of carrying change,” said Sri Kanaka Maha Lakshmi temple, executive officer, S. Jyothi Madhavi
