The Committee was constituted in November 1920, in the middle of the campaign to take the historic shrines out of hereditary hands, and it was given statutory standing five years later by the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925. It has an elected general house, an executive, a president, and a budget that runs into billions of rupees a year, drawn chiefly from offerings.
Its jurisdiction covers the historic gurdwaras of the Punjab and, historically, of neighbouring territories; a separate committee for Haryana was created by that state in 2014 and the arrangement has been contested. The Golden Temple complex at Amritsar is the largest single charge, with the langar there among the biggest continuously operating free kitchens in the world.
What it runs beyond the shrines is substantial: colleges and schools, hospitals, a printing operation, a network of preaching and educational committees, and the administration of the Akal Takht, whose jathedar it appoints. That last point is the one most often raised in discussion of the Committee, because it places the appointment of the holder of the highest temporal seat in Sikhism within the gift of a body that is itself elected on party lines. The arrangement is a direct product of the 1925 settlement rather than of anybody's design.