Mumbai : After the groundbreaking ritual for the national memorial for Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar memorial on Indu Mill land, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj statue project in the Arabian Sea off Nariman Point may the next populist event for the Devendra Fadnavis government, which will celebrate its first anniversary on October 31.
Five firms have filed their bids for being appointed as the Project Management Consultants (PMC) for the Maharashtra government’s ambitious project. This is the fourth time that the state government had invited bids as bids invited three times in the past did not work out due to various reasons ranging from lack of response to lack of details.
“Five firms have responded to our call for appointing PMC for the project,” a senior official in the General Administration Department of the state government told FPJ. “They are Tata Consulting Engineers, Responsive, Aziz Design Associates, Sunil Patil and Associates, and Fairwood.”
He informed that the bids were being evaluated and the technical scrutiny would be done in the next few days, after which a final decision on appointing the PMC would be taken by the end of this month.
Incidentally, as the timing of appointing PMC coincides with the first anniversary of the state government, the BJP may use the occasion to claim credit for the long-pending project. It may be recalled that the BJP had turned the groundbreaking ceremony of the Ambedkar memorial at the hands of Prime Minister Narendra Modi a party affair and had not invited Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray or leaders of Congress or NCP. Considering its cold war with the Sena, the BJP may use the occasion to upstage its ally, besides mocking at Congress and NCP.
The Congress-NCP alliance which was ruling the state before the BJP wrested power last year, had announced the creation of the tallest statue in the world of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. It was one of its poll planks for the 2009 assembly elections as well as the 2014 assembly polls. However, the project has not taken off.
The project includes a 192-metre statue of the Maratha warrior, a museum, a theatre and an art gallery to be created in the sea, about 1.2 km from Raj Bhavan and 3 km from Nariman Point, on hard rock below the sea.
