Ahmedabad, Jun 26 (FP) : Seven months after then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi flagged off a thousand trucks to seek farmers' donations for scraps of iron for his proposed Statue of Unity, envisaged as the world's tallest statue, the collection of iron for the gigantic statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel has slowed to a crawl, especially since the formation of the Modi government.
The Indian Express reports that the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd (SSNNL) godown in Vadodara, where all the collected iron is being stored, "has seen little action over the last two months".
It quotes an official as admitting that the last time boxes of the farm implements and a list of donors came was on 24 April.
LK Advani and Narendra Modi. AFP.LK Advani and Narendra Modi pose with a smaller statue at the foundation stone-laying ceremony last year. AFP.
The collection of iron for the statue has been compared in the past to the pan-India collection of bricks for the proposed Ram
Mandir in Aydohya, with a nationalistic twist instead of the overtly Hindutva agenda of that drive.
Having laid the foundation stone for the statue in October last year, Modi flagged off about 1,000 trucks in December, carrying thousands of empty kits including cartons and canisters for village soil. Seven months later, records at the SSNNL office in Vadodara reportedly show that as many as 16 states have contributed nothing, including BJP-ruled Rajasthan, the entire north-east, as well as Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Kerala and Maharashtra.
"Uttar Pradesh has contributed the largest number of kits — 40,000 — beating Modi’s home state Gujarat to second place with 33,000 kits. Tamil Nadu sent 12,000; Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Chandigarh 10,000 each," the report said.
As recently as the second week of June, Modi's successor in Gujarat, Chief Minister Anandiben Patel promised an early start to work on building the 182-metre tall statue for which she sought 'national project' status.
Price bids for construction contracts would be out in a month, said a report in Business Standard.
The statue is slated to be taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro and is also taller than the Sardar Sarovar Dam.
The 182-metre tall statue will come up on a 19,700-square metre project area, and will be surrounded by a 12 km-long man-made lake. There would be a memorial garden, a bridge connecting the Sadhu island (a natural island in the Narmada on which the statue would stand) with the mainland, hotel and convention center, said reports.