There are now fears of a clash between Sai Baba's family and the trust, which could also provide an excuse for the local state government to step in. The local Economic Times newspaper estimated its worth at up to £5bn though admitted no accurate valuation was possible. Sai Baba did not appoint any successor to run his sprawling spiritual and temporal empire, currently run by a trust, after his death. There are thought to be more than 1,200 centres of his Sathya Sai organisation in over a hundred countries around the world. Volunteers working with Sai Baba's NGOs have effectively delivered disaster relief and undertaken large-scale developmental works that have brought water or sanitation to hundreds of thousands of people. Since Sai Baba founded his first permanent meditation centre more than 60 years ago, a vast construction programme funded by donations has converted the remote village where he was born into a thriving small city with dozens of temples, its own 220-bed specialised hospital offering free treatment, a university and an airport where charter planes bringing devotees from around the world arrive every day. Sarah Ferguson has visited one of his ashrams. Overseas, they include Goldie Hawn and Isaac Tigrett, the founder of Hard Rock café. He will be back," Vandana Bhalla, a 38-year-old housewife in the Indian capital's middle-class Ashok Vihar neighbourhood told the Guardian.Īmong Sai Baba's estimated six million followers are hundreds of top Indian politicians, industrialists, tycoons, Bollywood stars and sportsmen such as cricketer Sachin Tendulkar. Many refused to accept that the guru was dead. In Delhi, worshippers gathered to pray at temples across the city. In the city of Bangalore, followers walked through the streets carrying portraits of the dead spiritual leader and chanting "Baba is not with us physically. Hundreds of police were deployed in his hometown of Puttaparthi, to maintain order among the thousands of devotees who had gathered over recent days. The government of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where Sai Baba was born, declared four days of mourning.
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