Court sacks 18 Saibaba temple trustees

In a jolt to the Maharashtra government, the Bombay High Court Tuesday sacked the 18 members of the Shirdi-based Shri Saibaba Sansthan Trust, a lawyer said.

The court’s Aurangabad bench comprising Justice Naresh Patil and T.V. Nalawade ordered the government to “appoint a new committee within 15 days, failing which the collector and other officials would take over as administrators”, lawyer R.N. Dhorde, representing the trust, told IANS.

The existing committee, which had a tenure of three years, had been managing the trust affairs for over seven years on an ad hoc basis as the government had failed to appoint a new committee, said a trust official, preferring anonymity.

Ranked as the second richest religious trust in the country with assets worth over Rs.19 billion, the powerful trust is the governing and administrative body of the world famous Shri Saibaba’s samadhi temple here and all other temples in this premises, and devotes itself towards development of Shirdi village and surroundings.