Ayodhya: planning your darshan

A temple still being finished

The consecration of Ram Lalla took place on 22 January 2024, and the Ram Darbar on the first floor was consecrated in June 2025. Construction of the temple itself was declared complete in September 2026, while the museum and auditorium in the wider complex are still going up. What you visit now is finished in its essentials but sits inside a site that is still changing.

The temple stands in Ramkot, on the site at the centre of a dispute that ran through the courts for decades and was settled by the Supreme Court in 2019. We set that history out plainly, without taking a side.

Free means free

Ordinary darshan needs no booking and costs nothing. Passes exist only for the three aartis, and the trust states on its own homepage that it charges no fee for them. That single fact is worth carrying with you, because Ayodhya draws more fake booking sites, fake prasad deliveries and fake "VIP pass" apps than any other temple in this network. The passes page lists the ones documented so far.

The town fills up twice a year

Ram Navami in spring and the Deepotsav week before Diwali are the two peaks, and Deepotsav has become a state-run event on the Saryu ghats with lakhs of lamps lit at once. Kartik Purnima and the two parikramas that precede it bring their own crowds in November. All the dates are in our calendar.

Visitor numbers here have grown faster than anywhere else in India: Uttar Pradesh recorded a few lakh visitors to Ayodhya in 2017 and counts them in crores now. Plan around that rather than around the size of the old town.