In midst of his visit focused mainly on attracting American investment for his state, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis turned his attention to the Statue of Liberty in Ellis Island, seeking to know the engineering skills behind installing the colossal sculpture weighing some 450,000 pounds.
A team of senior officials, accompanying Fadnavis during his New York stay went to the Island to learn from US authorities firsthand how such a heavy statue was mounted on a pedestal and has remained stable despite storm and high winds for decades.
Highly placed official sources said that the reason for the inquiry was that the State Government has planned to install a life-size statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji in the Arabian Sea off the Mumbai coast, and the chief minister wanted to know how best the Shivaji statue could be mounted in the sea, and could be enduring like the Statue of Liberty.
“Of course, the chief minister did not have the time in the midst of meetings, but he sent his officials who briefed him in detail about how best to go about it,” the sources told News India Times.
The Chhatrapati Shivaji memorial will come up on a 16 hectare rocky outcrop, 1.5 kms from the Raj Bhavan off Marine Drive. Planned on the lines of the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Swami Vivekananda Rock Memorial in Kanyakumari, the Shivaji memorial will be 190 feet tall. The statue will be erected atop three level pedestals which will also house a museum, art gallery and recreation centre.
To a question, the sources said no timeframe has yet been set by the government for the completion of the project. “This was basically a fact-finding tour before the idea takes concrete shape.”
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