A committee of scholars is preparing proposal for UNESCO after UP govt announced Rs 133-crore package to develop infrastructure of temple town.
A group of academics and scholars have decided to breathe life into a five-year-old proposal and give a fresh push to include the flashpoint temple town of Ayodhya in the UNESCO’s World Heritage City list.
A core committee was formed in August this year under the chairmanship of Dr Manoj Dixit, vice-chancellor, RML Avadh University, Faizabad, to expedite the proposal to make the Sarayu riverfront and old city of Ayodhya part of a heritage zone.
The group was formed in the aftermath of the 24 March agreement signed between the Union culture ministry and UP’s new government of Yogi Adityanath for the development of five cities — Gorakhpur, Varanasi, Mathura, Agra and Ayodhya — as part of a programme to promote “religious heritage” and “pilgrimage tourism”.
A Rs 133-crore package was also announced by the state government to develop the ghats and take up other infrastructure projects in Ayodhya, which is home to more than 100 temples.
The heritage city proposal was first mooted in 2012 when Ayodhya Faizabad Relations Trust (AFRT), an NGO, and the then Samajwadi Party government showed interest in pursuing the matter. But it was not pursued in earnest.
The issue was revived in March this year.
“The very process of forwarding the proposal requires more than a year’s time. We are preparing documents wherein we will cite historical evidence to back our claim,” Dixit told ThePrint.
He, however, ruled out any government involvement in the issue at the moment. In July this year, the walled city of Ahmedabad, including the Sabarmati riverfront, was given the World Heritage City tag.
“There are 10 criteria set by the UNESCO for any project to be qualified for the heritage tag. Most of the current heritage cities had fulfilled only five conditions. Ayodhya fulfils eight out of 10 and we are quite sure of our success,” Dixit said.
The proposal was also discussed in a recent meeting of the Seoul-based Asian Cultural Landscape Association (ACLA), a think tank working on preserving religious and historical traditions of Asia. The next meeting would be held in Ayodhya on 23-26 October, 2018.
“We have a one-year window during which we need to complete all the documentations and present our claim for declaring Ayodhya a heritage site. The idea of the meeting in Ayodhya, where scholars from more than 40 countries are expected to assemble, has been planned to showcase the city to the world and strengthen our claim for its inclusion in the heritage city list,” Dixit.
The UP government, however, said no such proposal has come to its notice.
“The government has not received any proposal on the issue. Ayodhya is a city for all religions — Hindu, Jain, Buddhism and Islam. There are several temples and monuments, which talk about the harmonious past of the place. Once the team working on this formally sends the proposal, we will take a call,” said Awanish Kumar Awasthi, principal secretary & director general, department of tourism, UP.