INSIDE THE MAKEOVER OF A TEMPLE TOWN

Infrastructure and real estate projects around the Ram temple in Ayodhya have picked up pace

- Madhurima Nandy

The bricks have ‘Shri Ram 2023’ inscribed on each of them. Trucks with hundreds and thousands of these bricks move along the Ram Path, a 13-km long busy road that stretches from Sahadatganj to Naya Ghat in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.

The road, which leads to the under-construction Ram temple, is being widened and laid with pavement blocks. Houses and shops on both sides of the road are in the middle of a makeover. Building facades are being redone. Every single building front is being painted in the identical shade of yellow with a temple spire drawn on them. Shutters of every shop have different Hindu religious motifs painted – the swastika, the conch shell and the Tripund (the three parallel lines on Shiva’s forehead) among others.

The temple would be inaugurated a month from now—on 22 January. The arterial road will bring in millions of devotees and tourists from the Lucknow-Gorakhpur National Highway (NH)-27. Construction work, therefore, is on at breakneck speed.

"My family has lived in Ayodhya for generations and we have never had this kind of construction," Anil Singh, a local taxi driver, says. "The whole place looked like it was being broken down till a few months back. There was digging and dust everywhere."

The landscape of Ayodhya, with its narrow, crammed lanes and bylanes, transformed gradually after the November 2019 Supreme Court verdict that cleared the way for the construction of the Ram temple at the disputed site. The ‘Ayodhya Master Plan 2031’ was approved a year ago by the state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath. That’s when the real rebuilding started.