Mumbai plans the world’s tallest statue

Mumbai plans the world’s tallest statue

IT MAY have named the airport, the main railway station, a big road, a park, a museum, a theatre and at least six traffic intersections after him, but Mumbai has not done enough to commemorate Shivaji, a swashbuckling warrior prince who founded a local kingdom in the 17th century. The obvious solution, according to all the big political parties in the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, is to build an absolutely enormous statue of him on an artificial island in the ocean near the city.
When this idea was first cooked up, in 2004, the statue was planned to be 98 metres tall, to top the Statue of Liberty, which is a mere 93 metres. But then the neighbouring state of Gujarat decided to build a 182-metre figure of Vallabhbhai Patel, an independence hero. Maharashtra’s government resolved to make the statue of Shivaji the tallest in the world, at 192 metres. Alas, it turns out there is a Buddha in China that is 208 metres high. So now Maharashtra’s government is aiming for 210 metres.
The budget for the project is growing, too. It has risen from 1bn rupees ($16m) to 36bn—or so the government hopes. But when it recently issued a tender for the first phase of the project (excluding an amphitheatre and a few other bits and bobs), with a projected budget of 25bn rupees, the lowest bid came in at 38bn. The state’s debt, meanwhile, is 3.7trn rupees. The sum budgeted for the statue is seven times what Maharashtra spends on building and maintaining rural roads each year, or, for the historically minded, enough to restore 300 forts around the state, including several built by Shivaji, according to IndiaSpend, a data-journalism website. Environmentalists and fishermen, meanwhile, complain that the project will harm local fish stocks.
But resisting a tribute to Shivaji in Maharashtra is the political equivalent of spitting on babies. If there are opponents of the scheme in the state assembly, they are keeping quiet. Narendra Modi, the prime minister, is a fan. He laid an underwater foundation stone in December. Earlier this year he unveiled a giant statue of the god Shiva in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. It was he, in fact, who broke ground for the statue in Gujarat, when he was chief minister of the state. It may not be long before someone—a stonemason, perhaps—decides to erect a gargantuan statue of him.