Maha may begin work on Shivaji memorial soon
The Maharashtra government is likely to perform bhumi puja (break ground) on the proposed grand memorial of Chhatrapati Shivaji near Mumbai in the first week of March. The government has sent the design to the Ministry of Environment and Forests for approval. The memorial will be the world’s tallest, at 190 m. Artists from the J.J. School of Arts have designed it.
The state government has decided to erect the memorial on a 16 hectare rocky outcrop in the Arabian Sea. It has appointed the National Engineering Environment Research Institute to study the impact of weather on the memorial. An official told The Sunday Guardian that NEERI has approved the memorial. “They studied the weather impact in all three seasons. They found that the monsoon will not have an adverse impact on the memorial,” he said.
According to the proposal, which The Sunday Guardian accessed, the statue will depict Shivaji on horseback. Surrounding the statue, there will be an open space to accommodate 3,000 people at a time. The memorial premises will include a museum, aquarium, amphitheatre and auditoriums of various sizes. The government expects around 10,000 people to visit the memorial every day. The Congress-NCP government is in a hurry to begin work for political mileage. Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan convinced then-Union Minister for Forest and Environment, Jayanthi Natrajan, to bend the rules and approve the offshore construction of the memorial.