Budget 2014: FM Jaitley pleases boss Modi, allots Rs 200 cr for Sardar Patel statue

In his maiden budget, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has allotted funds to several of PM Modi’s pet projects like smart cities and sanitation projects.

One of the allocations that might be hard to explain is the Sardar Vallabhai Patel statue of unity to come up in Gujarat.

As part of the BJP’s election promises, the party had promised to create a statue of Sardar Patel in Gujarat and launched a nation-wide movement to collect iron scrap donations from farmers.

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.

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 Ayodhya, with a nationalistic twist instead of the overtly Hindutva agenda of that drive.

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.

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.

Folks on Twitter didn’t take too kindly to the allocation for the statue.