India’s iron man has made India strong or weak?
The government has finished the work and inaugurated a humongous statue of India’s iron man Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in the state of Gujarat calling it the statue of unity. Surely the statue is not going to unite anyone but has for surely sucked out grandeur of $400 million from the pockets of the taxpayers of the country. The statue is double the height of the statue of liberty and higher than the spring temple of China.
The amount on the statue is 90% of the total amount allocated in the budget to spend on the development of roads and bridges, double the budget of the ministry of shipping or could have been used to irrigate 40000 hectares of land helping out the farmers to have a better yield from their fields but our government choose to build a statue to make a fool out of us where no one dares to ask questions. India is a developing nation with lots of issues such as poverty, farmer suicide, and rural India is still struggling to get fresh drinking water and other basic amenities.
Usually, in India, it takes for long to get an infrastructure project completed as they would find hurdles in acquiring land to finding sufficient funds in the stipulated time leading to an undue extension of the project beyond imagination. But this is a special case were Larsen and Turbo one of India’s leading and largest Infrastructure Development Company completed the project taking not more than 3 years of time. The project found its funds in a miraculous way as state-owned companies such as Gail India Ltd and Oil India Ltd put together a whopping $3.4 million for the project in the fancy name of corporate social responsibility just doing the opposite of that in the name of responsibility towards the society making 0% impact on the lives of the people who actually need help from these mammoth oil companies. Larsen and Turbo and IDFC Ltd have announced publically that out of the 104 infrastructure projects given to them from the government more than half have hit a roadblock due to insufficient funds.
This is just the beginning as the government plans to show its might to the rest of the world using the blood of its citizens as they have announced another project worth Rs 2500Cr to build a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.
The contract has been already given to Larsen and turbo. The government seems to find it more important going around the country and building statues rather than addressing and solving the real issues faced by the country which would be what if these eminent leaders whose statues they are building would have done if they were alive.
Comments