Teams inspect five temple vaults

C.V. Ananda Bose (left), director general of the National Museum, New Delhi, who heads the second committee appointed by the Supreme Court, at the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram on Monday. Photo: C. Ratheesh Kumar

The underground vaults of Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple here would be inspected to see how suited they are to preserve the vast amounts of gold, precious stones, ornaments and articles of antique value recently found inside them.

The inspection and assessment — by the representative of the Reserve Bank of India in the five-member committee set up by the Supreme Court to decide on the security, inventory and preservation of the articles inside the vaults — is expected to begin in a day or two.

The five-member committee headed by C.V. Ananda Bose, director general of the National Museum, New Delhi, and the three-member committee headed by the former judge of the Kerala High Court, M.N. Krishnan, held detailed meetings here on Monday.

After a meeting in the morning, the teams inspected all the five vaults which have been opened and inventoried. Following this, the committees met on Monday evening for a second, more detailed, meeting.

The meeting reportedly discussed the different core competencies of the committees' members, and distributed work relating to the conservation of the vaults' contents, the documentation, the storage and retrieval of the articles, the possibility of setting up of a museum inside the temple, and the question of whether or not to open vault B.

The meeting is understood to have concluded that the documentation of the articles inside the vaults would require additional logistical support. Therefore such work would not commence immediately. The question of recording on video the process of inventorying the vaults was not discussed at this meeting.

The representative of the Archaeological Survey of India has been tasked with segregating the vaults' contents into those that have antique value, those on which a monetary value can be placed, and those that are required for the daily/ special rituals at the temple.

The committees also received memoranda from different groups of devotees urging them not to do anything which would violate the traditions, practices and the sanctity of the temple.

The next meeting of the committees would be held either on August 10 or 11.