Devotees have urged the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department to develop an AI-enabled software system to help pilgrims get darshan faster and access temple-specific services without delays.
Tamil Nadu has 43,728 temples under HR&CE control. The department currently uses the Integrated Temple Management System (ITMS), developed through the National Informatics Centre (NIC), to provide information and issue darshan tickets.
Temple staff said ticket issuance often slows down because the website/server connection is unreliable at many temples. Since the main server is located only at the HR&CE headquarters campus in Nungambakkam, Chennai, each ticket requires a successful connection to the central server—sometimes taking two to three minutes, and occasionally failing altogether—leading to long queues, especially affecting elderly devotees.
They said the software appears outdated and not tailored to the needs of individual temples, and called for an upgrade aligned with current AI-era capabilities. Suggestions included setting up local server connectivity inside major temples, expanding ITMS to provide detailed information on each temple’s services, enabling wider digital payments such as Google Pay, recruiting IT-trained youth to handle software operations, and forming a dedicated team at the department office to address technical issues.
They also proposed introducing prepaid “smart cards” for high-footfall temples, allowing devotees to pay an annual fee (such as Rs 1,000 or Rs 2,000) and use card scanning for quicker entry, which they said could reduce crowding.
