Statue of Unity has surpassed the footfall of the Statue of Liberty in the United States, with an average of 15,000 visitors a day, in just over a year of its unveiling.
Netizens took to the micro-blogging site Twitter to express their delight over the news and thanking Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for the unveiling of the Statue of Unity, a tribute to India’s first Home Minister, Vallabhbhai Patel popularly known as “Ironman of India”. Since Saturday morning’#StatueofUnity’ has been with over 2,000 tweets.
Statue of Unity, located in Gujarat is an epic bronze sculpture measuring 600 feet (182m), outsmarting China’s Spring Temple Buddha (153m) and USA’s Statue of Liberty (93m). It was designed and built in 33 months at a whopping cost of Rs.2,989 crore. Statue of Unity of Sardar Vallabhbai Patel was inaugurated by PM Narendra Modi on October 31 on the leader’s birth anniversary.
The state CM said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had gathered iron, soil and water from across the nation to effectively use those ingredients in a bid to build the statue in Gujarat, it was an important decision announced by PM Modi in 2013 when he was the at the helm of Gujarat as the chief minister.
It is the “symbol of the country’s unity and integrity” and the Gujarat government describe it as “the statue of unity”.
One user tweeted: “Congratulations to @GujaratTourism @narendramodi for creating an iconic identity and a message in itself to our nation #StatueofUnity.”
“#StatueofUnity was the dream project of Narendra Modi. Now, this statue is proud of Gujarat and India. I will definitely visit there,” added another user.
Posting a tweet, one wrote “What a slap on the face of all the future predictors who were raising questions on the feasibility & economic viability of the #StatueofUnity project.”
According to the latest report about the revenue from Statue of Unity, the statue of Sardar Patel has been visited by over 26 lakh tourists and earned 71.66 crore rupees in the first 11 months itself. The overall statue cost 3,000 crore rupees, and taking this rate of revenue into account, the project would take less than 50 years to recover the whole amount.
It is worth mentioning here that Statue of Unity is already among the top 25 most visited places in the world. Statue of Unity has already been visited by more than 2.6 million people in the first 11 months. By the end of one year of opening of the structure to the public, the monument is likely to surpass Tower of London which received 2.85 million tourists in the year 2018.
At present, Tower of London is the beautiful structure in the great city of London and Statue of Unity is expected to dethrone it when the data for the whole year will be released by the end of the year. Sardar Patel Rashtriya Ekta Trust, which is the managing organization of the structure will release the one-year data very soon, as the structure had finished one year of public opening in October end.
The Statue of Unity was designed by the Indian sculptor Ram V. Sutar.