The Ministry of Urban Development and the Asian Development Bank are giving final touches to the plan for development of Rs 200-billion urban cor­ridor centered on Lumbini. The two-stage project seeks to boost engagement between the fast-urbanizing areas and the surrounding rural areas. As envisioned, the first stage will be completed by 2030 while the second stage will be completed by 2050. This urban corridor will connect the places that are no more than an hour’s drive from each other. Right now the corridor will link Nawal­parasi’s Ramgram, Rupande­hi’s Butwal, Siddhartha Nagar, Sainamaina, Tilottama and Lumbini Cultural Munici­pality as well as Kapilvastu’s Kapilvastu and Krishna Nagar municipalities.

“The corridor will be built in a way that people from rural areas can return to their homes every day, instead of having to shift to the cities where they work,” says Edward Lemon, the ADB plan leader.

The first phase of the project will cost around Rs 94 billion. There are plans to build roads, agricultural products process­ing centers, shopping centers, bus parks, as well as sewage and drinking-water manage­ment systems.

Moreover, there are pro­posals for Butwal-Tilotta­ma-Siddhartha Nagar and Lumbini-Tilaurakot-Devda­ha-Ramgram road corri­dors, as well as to develop Siddhartha Nagar-Ram­gram-Bhumahi, Krishna Nagar and Lumbini bypass roads into highways.

Crucially, the current plans do not talk about where the money for the ambitious project will come from.