Tirupati: A major scam involving the distribution of the famous Tirumala laddus in the recent past seems to have made the TTD top brass aware and alert.
The officials recently detected that outsourced staff members they had contracted to man the laddu prasadam ticket counters were involved in diverting over 14,000 laddus to black market at higher price.
The scam took place during Navaratri Brahmotsavams celebrations when the rush of devotees at the temple reached its peak. With thousands of devotees gathered, the ticket scanning system went down and officials were forced to issue the laddu prasadam without scanning the tokens. The contracted employees obtained thousand of laddus by using the tokens they had scanned days earlier. A probe has been launched into the matter by TTD's chief vigilance and security officer T. Siva Kumar.
The TTD top brass is now concentrated on streamlining scanning system which was handled by the TCS group. Apart from laddu, TTD also issued darshan and tonsure tokens after obtaining bio-metrics from the pilgrims. When the rush reaches the peaks, servers often crash and officials are forced to go for manual system.
To overcome the issue, TTD Tirumala JEO K. S. Srinivasa Raju convened a meeting of all department heads and technical staff at Annamaiah Bhavan in Tirumala on Tuesday and ordered the concerned to streamline the scanning system and establish a dedicated local server.
Speaking after the meeting, Mr. Srinivasa Raju told the media persons that around 9000 Laddus were diverted by the contracted staff and ensured strict actions against them. “We are going to streamline the entire system. A local server will be set up. If the scanning system fails, local server will help to regain the access,” he said.
In case the entire system collapses, we will issue computer-based tokens apart from other important measures,” he said.
