How we treat
each other here.

Everyone who takes part: people who submit or correct records, volunteers who verify them, pujaris and temple representatives, moderators, and the team that maintains the platform. It covers what you contribute to the site and how you conduct yourself when acting on its behalf — including a verification visit to a temple.

• Accuracy over enthusiasm. Submit what you know, mark what you are unsure of, and say where it came from. An honest gap is more useful than a confident guess.
• Respect at the temple.A verification visit is a visit to someone’s place of worship. Follow its customs, ask before photographing, and never disrupt a ritual to complete a task for this site.
• Respect across traditions. Sanatan Dharma contains many lineages that disagree with one another, and India contains many faiths besides. Describe differences; do not rank them.
• Care with people’s details. Information you encounter while verifying — a phone number, a document, a family’s circumstances — is for the verification and nothing else.

• Submitting records you know to be false, or verifying something you did not actually check.
• Harassment, threats, slurs, or abuse directed at anyone — on the platform or while representing it.
• Attacking or demeaning any religion, caste, community, region, gender, or the practices of another tradition.
• Publishing another person’s private information, or using details gathered here to contact them for anything else.
• Soliciting donations, selling services, or using a listing for political campaigning.
• Impersonating a temple, a trust, a pujari, or a member of the DharmSetu team.
• Using verification status to extract money, favours, or preferential treatment.

Report anything that breaches this code through the contact form. Tell us what happened and point us at the page or the record. Reports are read by a person, not a filter, and we will not share your identity with the person you are reporting.

If someone is in immediate danger, contact the local authorities first. This is a website; it is not an emergency service.

We look at what was reported and at the record behind it. Depending on what we find, that can mean a correction, removing the contribution, withdrawing verification rights, or closing an account. Deliberately falsifying a verification is the most serious thing on this list, because the entire platform rests on those checks being real.

Actions that affect trust — a verification withdrawn, a record suspended — are recorded rather than applied invisibly, so the history of a listing stays legible.