AI and Big Data for Urban Sustainability: Assessing the Environmental and Economic Impacts of Ram Mandir on Ayodhya’s Urban Landscape

IJEP 46(5): 487-496 : Vol. 46 Issue. 5 (May 2026)

Full Text

Samdish Sharma and Manas Ranjan Behera*

Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Noida – 201 309, Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract

The emergence of the Ram mandir in Ayodhya has prompted significant environmental and economic changes that should be assessed through data-driven evaluations of urban sustainability. Researchers will support the project by comparing pre- and post-temple conditions using AI and Big data, with a stratified sample of 500 (300 females and 200 males), enabling analysis by occupation group. Remote sensing with Sentinel-2 will identify landuse changes and urban sprawl, while long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA)-based models will forecast increases in air pollution, energy use and temperature. Ecological impact will be measured using an environmental sustainability index (ESI) based on principal component analysis (PCA). Economically, multivariate regression, spatial econometrics and input-output analysis will examine impacts related to tourism, real estate and entrepreneurship. Cluster analysis and difference-in-differences (DiD) will address gender-based differences, particularly for women-owned microenterprises. These methods provide robust support, employing GIS, SPSS and Python for machine learning. The resulting urban impact assessment model (UIAM) offers a forward-looking approach to align religious infrastructure development with urban sustainability, demonstrating that spiritual heritage and sustainable urban growth can coexist.

Keywords

Urban sustainability, Ram mandir, Big data, Artificial intelligence, Socio-economic impact, Remote sensing, Migration, Economic modelling

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