An Indian teacher has built a $260,000 (£195,000) replica model of the Taj Mahal for his wife as a symbol of his love.

52-year-old Anand Prakash Chouksey, from Burhanpur in the western Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, built the marble replica for his wife of 27 years, Manjushah.

The scaled down version, which took three years to build, is one-third of the size of the original and includes a meditation room for his wife and four bedrooms across 8,000 sq ft.

“She is happy with me in every situation, all ups and downs. She always supports me irrespective of my gift. She only had one demand with this house that she wanted a good meditation room inside the house. So, I told the engineers to put a special focus on the meditation room,” Mr Chouksey said.

His son Kabir added that they had to rebuild some of the arches three to four times to make sure the building was perfectly to scale.

The replica in Burhanpur is located 500 miles from the original Taj Mahal, in the city of Agra, south of Delhi.

The family visited the Taj Mahal in Agra and used images from the internet to obtain the exact measurements for the scaled-down romantic monument.

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The Taj Mahal was built in the 17th century by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan to house the tomb of his favourite wife, Mumtaz, who died while giving birth.

The building is considered to be one of the greatest architectural achievement in Indo-Islamic architecture and is visited by nearly seven million tourists a year, according to official data.

The scaled down Taj Mahal is open to visitors, like its counterpart, but only during school hours.

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