Is it time for the Telangana State government to examine the State Endowment Department’s operations and the façade of previous administrations? Prevent the Endowment Department from acting alone to establish institutions and schools without seeking community input and approval in order to support its trustee role? deny the United Andhra Pradesh and Telangana the colonial administrative system that the British left behind for the management of Hindu temples and property.

These inquiries follow the decision made at a recent meeting about the development of the Vemulawada Temple, whereby the Endowment Department was requested to draft plans for the establishment of a Vedic school.

Sources, however, claim that no justification, goal, or purpose has been found for establishing a Vedic school. What short-, medium-, and long-term goals are established and discussed, as well as how the planned school should develop going forward.

“Any proposal to establish a Vedic School is meant to encourage the learning of different branches of the Vedas,” the State Endowment Department stated in response to questions. Additionally, there are other customs pertaining to ritual performance and similar activities. According to the sources, this has been the regular procedure from the Endowment Department’s time in United Andhra Pradesh.

Even after the British departed the nation 75 years ago, investigations showed that the Commissioner of the endowments operates under the stricter supervision of the State Revenue Department, much as it did under a Revenue Board during the Colonial British period.

Furthermore, despite the fact that the department works with Hindu studies on a daily basis, it lacks a distinct research section. As a prerequisite for managing the temple administration, which reflects thousands of years of custom, culture, and legacy, passing the State service commission test is considered a given. The majority of the employees working in the secular administration of the Hindu temple, aside from those involved in the sacred portion of its operations, are either unqualified or inadequately qualified in any of the fields of Hindu studies, temple traditions, architecture and construction engineering, schools of sculpture, culture, and a variety of other study verticals centered around the development of temples.

Apart from participating in a variety of events, the department has scarcely shown any ability to think creatively. These include building pilgrim facilities, trekking and offering paid Sava services to the god, starting new fundraising initiatives, and attracting more pilgrims, all of which have increased the department’s income.

The Endowment Department’s top-down trusteeship function lacks innovative thinking, which reveals that the current administrative structure is out-of-date, redundant, and antiquated.

For instance, early on, a group of representatives from the Telangana Council of Higher Education (TGHE) traveled to Estonia, and a group of representatives from Estonia visited Hyderabad. This intended to investigate cooperation for cyber security research and teaching.

But for more than 200 years, the University of Tartu in the same nation has served as a hub for Hindu studies.

Why do institutions in Europe, the West, and other countries, such as the University of Tartu, study Hindu studies under different names? Why have linguistic schools that are a component of Hindu traditions, such as Nyaya-Vaiseshika, become the subject of study and research in Europe and the West?

The Telangana Charitable and Hindu Religious Institutions and Endowments Act, 1987, for instance, states in Section 30 that “Any reference to Hindu shall be construed as including a reference to a person professing Buddhist, Jain, or Sikh religion, and the reference to Hindu religious institutions shall be construed accordingly.”

The State Endowment Department, however, has not invested or provided even a single rupee for any activity since Telangana was created, such as publishing books or starting research journals to highlight the contributions of Acharya Nagarjuna or others to linguistics schools, consciousness and perception studies, cognitive studies, and a variety of other fields with current relevance in areas like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the development of language models required for the Certification Intelligence (AI). Why did the Hindu Religious Endowments Department not create institutions for the members of that religious tradition using the money received from their temples to study what was left of them while others have been studying Hindu studies and the thousands of years of their religious, cultural, and intellectual repositories and their relevance today?