Sathya Sai Baba ashram residential schools (Puttaparthi)

The Sri Sathya Sai Higher Secondary School and the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, chartered in 1981, are free, residential educational institutions operated by the Sathya Sai Central Trust inside the Puttaparthi ashram complex in Andhra Pradesh -- distinct from the broader global Sathya Sai devotional movement founded around Sathya Sai Baba (1926-2011), which this catalogue profiles separately. Free admission drew students from across India and the international devotee diaspora into a residential campus in which the guru himself held regular private and small-group access to students and younger devotees, including individual "interview room" audiences. That structure -- placing minors under direct, often unsupervised access to Sai Baba as a routine part of school and ashram life rather than as an occasional public event -- is the specific institutional mechanism at issue in decades of abuse allegations against him.

Public allegations of sexual abuse by Sai Baba drew sustained Western media coverage from around 2000-2001, when India Today reported on continuing molestation allegations and other outlets, including the Vancouver Sun, covered claims that had circulated for years within devotee networks. The most widely cited account is that of Alaya Rahm, a former devotee who said Sai Baba sexually abused him as a minor; Rahm was featured, together with fellow ex-devotee Mark Roche (a 25-year movement member), in the BBC's 2004 documentary The Secret Swami, part of its "This World" series, which also carried allegations from longtime Indian critic Basava Premanand disputing Sai Baba's claimed miracles. In 2002, concerns about risk to visiting minors were serious enough to be raised in the UK Parliament. No criminal prosecution or civil adjudication of the abuse allegations was ever completed: Sai Baba died in April 2011 without facing trial, and no court made a formal finding on the claims either way.

Separately, in June 1993, four devotees entered Sai Baba's private quarters at the ashram under the pretext of delivering a telegram; when confronted, they fatally stabbed two of his attendants and injured two others before barricading themselves inside his living room, where police shot and killed all four -- six deaths in total. Contemporary and later Indian press coverage has described the incident's motive as never officially established; Sai Baba was unharmed and later stated publicly that no assassination attempt had occurred. After his death, trust officials opened his previously sealed private residence in the presence of tax and banking authorities and inventoried roughly 98 kg of gold, 307 kg of silver, and over 116 million rupees in cash, subsequently transferred into Sai Central Trust accounts -- figures cited by critics as evidence of the same opaque, unaccountable personal financial control that existed alongside the Trust's stated charitable and educational mission, including its residential schools.