Ayodhya Comprehensive Development Plan

Core idea

Pilgrimage city expansion

Why it matters

Large-scale religious tourism planning

Description

A comprehensive development plan for Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, prepared under the state government in the 2020s alongside construction of the Ram temple. It plans a major expansion of the pilgrimage city, with new arrival corridors and widened processional routes, station and airport upgrades, riverfront works along the Sarayu, and large-scale accommodation and infrastructure for anticipated mass religious tourism. The plan reworks a small historic temple town into a national pilgrimage destination.

Significance

Ayodhya is one of the most consequential contemporary examples of sacred and state-sponsored urbanism, reviving the old tradition of planning cities around cosmological and religious order at modern infrastructural scale. It is also politically charged, entangled with the temple's contested history, and has prompted debate about displacement, heritage and the use of urban planning as an instrument of religious nationalism.

What shaped it

• The master plan (early 20th c.)
• The imperial capital and the central axis (fullest form Ming Beijing, from 1420)
• The vastu-purusha mandala diagram (c. 6th c. CE (codified))

Sources

• https://www.ayodhyada.in/MasterPlan.aspx
• https://www.99acres.com/articles/ayodhya-development-authority.html