After e-pooja, e-hundi, e-darshan and e-donations temples in Tamil Nadu will soon go the e-commerce way by offering e-sales on their websites.
Devotees across the globe can now buy pictures, diaries, calendars, prasadham and religious books of various temples at the click of a mouse.
The world famous Meenakshi Sundareswarar temple in Madurai will be the first temple to commence the service in the next few weeks.
“The technical work is on. Soon, the website will have a separate link for e-sales,” said an official at the Meenakshi Amman Temple.
“The products that we intend to sell are only available within the temple premises now. With this new launch, people can buy it sitting at any corner of the world,” he added.
However, the temple’s signature product ‘Meenakshi Amman Kungumam’ (vermillion) will not be available online. “Some countries do not allow Kungumam . We are studying on that,” a HR&CE official said.
At present, the temple has more than 6,300 registered users who make use of the online portal for performing special abhishekam and pujas .
The temple website gets traffic from Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and cities across China, UAE, UK and US. The temple authorities believe that the users would also buy online.
e-sales in 12 temples
In the next six months, twelve temples would offer e-sales.
“Every temple has something unique and we want our devotees to reach out to devotional items easily,” said P Dhanapal, Commissioner, Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department.
“We recently revived all our e-services across all temples. There has been a good response. We had a tie-up with only one bank. But now we have tied up with multiple banks for our e-services and it has helped our online platform,” he said.
Currently, in Tamil Nadu there are 38,575 Hindu Religious and Jain religious institutions under the control of the HR&CE Department.
