Inside the makeover of a temple town

livemint.com:

Yogi Adityanath. That’s when the real rebuilding started. The plan includes a new airport, rejuvenation of the railway station, new road-over-bridges, multi-level car parks with food courts, hotels, townships, an aerocity, road widening, and beautification.

More than 200 different projects backed by the central and state governments are being executed in the town presently with a sanctioned budget of over ₹30,000 crore. Private investments are pouring in as well. Vishal Singh, vice chairman at the Ayodhya Development Authority (ADA), a key agency leading the development work, says that the city had not seen any organized development for years.

“After the 2019 verdict, a Vision Document 2047 was designed to plan what Ayodhya could become and the kind of development that was possible. The goal is to make Ayodhya the global spiritual capital," he says. “The journey has just started and the development you see is the beginning.

We are nowhere near completion, but we know where we are going," he adds. In the office corridors of the Ayodhya Development Authority (ADA) in Faizabad area of the town, everyone walks around wearing new colourful badges that say ‘Humari Ayodhya’ (Our Ayodhya). There is visible urgency as executives rush from one room to the other carrying stacks of files.

Project plans are being approved; fresh tenders for civic and beautification works are being uploaded on the agency’s website; Singh and his colleagues are perennially in video conferences and back-to-back meetings. Ayodhya, until a few years back was a smallish nagar palika (municipal council) in the former Faizabad district. Faizabad and Ayodhya were merged in 2018 and the entire area is now under the Ayodhya Municipal Corporation.