Place · statue · India
Statue of Unity
Also known as Sardar Patel statue, Ekta Nagar, Sadhu Bet, Statue of Unity, Sardar Patel Statue, SOU
The 182-metre bronze-and-steel statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel on an island in the Narmada's Sardar Sarovar reservoir in Gujarat, inaugurated on 31 October 2018 — Patel's 143rd birth anniversary. The statue, designed by Ram V. Sutar and built by Larsen & Toubro, is the tallest statue in the world (about 54 metres taller than the Spring Temple Buddha in China). The 1,850-tonne bronze was partly sourced from a village-level iron collection — the Statue of Unity Movement collected tools from six hundred thousand villages in Gujarat as symbolic iron for the casting. The site has a viewing gallery, museum and tent city for visitors.
- Date
- 2010–2018
- Periods
- Republic and Living Practice
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Patron dynasty
- Indian Union
- Tradition
- Standard reference; INTACH, ASI and municipal records; institutional histories.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 21.840, 73.720
Worth knowing
The height was chosen to echo the 182 assembly seats in Gujarat. The bronze cladding was cast in China.
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyShoolpaneshwar
The Statue of Unity stands on an island below the dam, a hundred and eighty-two metres of Sardar Patel facing the reservoir, opened in 2018 and built partly with iron collected from farmers across India. It looks out over the Shoolpaneshwar forest and the villages the reservoir displaced, which makes the two neighbours on this reach an unusually direct statement about what the Narmada valley project was for and whom it cost.
- Site adjacencyAhmedabad / Karnāvatī / Āshāval
The Statue of Unity sits on an island in the Narmada's Sardar Sarovar reservoir about 150 kilometres south of Ahmedabad in the Narmada district of Gujarat. The 2018 inauguration of the 182-metre statue — the tallest in the world — made Kevadia a tourism destination within the greater Gujarat regional landscape centred on Ahmedabad.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Statue of Unity”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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