The southernly state of India, Kerala is the home of the world's richest temple. In a country where the rights of a deity or the idol are protected as that of a man, Lord Padmanabha can be considered as the richest man on planet earth.

Unlike a large number of temples in the state that is controlled by the government, Padmanabha Swamy temple was under the rule of a temple trust which was formulated by the Travancore royal family.

The Hindu kings of South India were highly rich, when their kingdoms came under attack by the Tipu most of them fled with their fortune to Travancore, the then strong kingdom. These kings and their family deposited their fortunes for safekeeping with lord Padmanabha Swamy, and after Tipu's defeat donated it all to the god. 

The temple whose origins dated back to thousands of years received enormous amounts of wealth in donations that were secured in vaults.

The Travancore royal family donated an enormous portion of its wealth to the lord Padmanabha Swamy and took the name as 

" Sree Padmanabha dasan" -the servant of the Lord Padmanabha. Until now all the kings of Travancore are called Shri Padmanabha dasan.

It was back in 2011 when some gold was found missing from the temple vaults, litigation led to the appointment of former CAG Vinod Rai to take an account of the wealth of the temple. The team marked the vaults as A, B, C, etc, and then estimated the net worth to be 22 billion dollars.

They were surprised to see the most precious stones, articles, and jewelry inside vaults that were filled with dust.

Due to reasons of faith, the royal family opposed opening vault B, which was locked by using ancient technology. There was no record of the vault opened before. Vault B is said to be the largest of all with several inner vaults. In the course of debates and litigation the then maharaja of Travancore passed away, and the new maharaja was coronated.

The vault B can only be opened by chanting the garuda mantra and currently, there is no one in the world who knows to use the garudamanthra. Opening the vault by manmade technology will have grave consequences.

When the enormous wealth was found, the government took control of the temple and provided security.

Later this year the court asked the responsible officer to handover the governing duties of the temple to a trust which has the royal family's participation.

The estimates without contends of vault B was done in 2011. Considering that the price of gold is more than double now, along with precious stones whose value is always going high the estimate will not be even close.

As of now, there is not much chance that vault B will be opened. So we will never know the exact number. A 2015 Article on Forbes estimated it to be worth over a trillion dollars.