VELLORE, INDIA, January 23, 2014 (The Hindu): Residents of Ayyanur, about three miles west of Ambur, thought of a novel but hi-tech idea of retaining a small 300-year-old Amman temple when the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) decided to demolish it to facilitate the widening of the four-lane Chennai-Bangalore National Highway into a six-lane highway.
R. Moorthy, president of the renovation committee of the temple said that he got the idea of relocating the temple by seeing such structural relocations of buildings done in the U.S. on National Geographic channel. They hired a Haryana-based company which was professionally undertaking structural relocations. They fixed a steel framework under the temple and with the use of jacks, moved it at the rate of 8 feet a day to its new location. As part of the process, they also rotated it to face east.