Daswandh is the tenth part of income given by a Sikh to the community. It is not a tax and there is no collection mechanism, and it was set out by the Gurus as an obligation on the earner.
It funded the building of Amritsar and Tarn Taran, the establishments of the Gurus, and the Khalsa's operations in the eighteenth century.
It funds gurdwaras now. The golak, the offering box, and the direct donation of labour and goods are the visible forms.
The scale is large and almost entirely unaudited. Gurdwara accounts are not published in any consistent way, the SGPC's budget is public and its full property holdings are not, and diaspora gurdwaras are subject to whatever their local charity law requires and often to nothing more.
Disputes over gurdwara money and elections are a recurring feature of Punjabi community life on three continents, and they exist because a five-hundred-year-old practice of voluntary giving has never been matched by a practice of accounting for it.
The tenth part of earnings given to the community is the obligation, and it is what funded the shrines, the langars, the building and, in the Guru period, the arms.
The masands were the appointed collectors of it, and the office was abolished by Guru Gobind Singh Ji after it became a means of private accumulation.
It is why Sikh institutions do not need state money and it is also why control of the golak is worth fighting for. Both consequences follow from the same practice.