The Tale of Two Monuments..

Two interesting developments happened last week. A marvellous piece of engineering and hard-work resulted in the Bandra Worli Link Bridge. Another marvellous piece of construction and art resulted in the spectacular statues of Ambedkar, Mayawati, Kanshiram and the BSP elephant!

The bridge has now been opened for vehicular traffic. This bridge took a pretty long time, lot of sweat and blood of thousands of labourers and huge cost overruns to eventually complete after 10 years and $325 Million. Despite the cost and the painful wait, at last we have something in which India and Mumbai can take pride. The immediate beneficiaries are the people of Mumbai. Along with the other such projects put together, it is expected that there should be considerable amount of traffic decongestion.


Talking about the other marvellous piece of design and artistic work in the Mayawati statues - as per the latest estimates the tall statues of the equally "tall" personalities come at a cost of about Rs.2000 Crores! A little bit of scribble-pad calculations, assuming Rs.50 to a dollar leads me to the conclusion that the bridge in Mumbai costs somewhere around Rs. 1600 Crores. Thus the monumental statues in Uttar Pradesh beat the bridge by a whopping Rs.400 Crores. No prize for guessing which one is a bigger monumental achievement! Besides, the statues are a great piece of art-work. I mean, look at the statue of Mayawati. The compassion and empathy in the eyes of the lady's statue is in sharp contrast to the villainous body language of the real lady. Whosoever has designed the statues has done a commendable and a challenging job!


So how do the two structures plan to recover their respective costs? We are told that the toll for the bridge is going to be Rs.50 one-way. There are going to be monthly passes as well. As per estimates about 100,000 vehicles are going to use the bridge, daily. Again, going back to my handie-dandie notepad, my calculations suggest the bridge will break-even with its fixed cost in about 10 years.

There is no estimate on how UP plans to recover the costs of those statues. In the absence of any known methods of recovering the costs, here are a few suggestions I would like to make. A statue is no good unless there are those people who answer the nature's call at the foot of the statues. So lets put a toll of say, Rs. 100 on those who are in a state of urgency and need to use the statue. We can also introduce monthly passes and life-memberships! Also, there can be tolls for those romeos and juliets who have to scribble their names and graffities on the statues. You have some interesting suggestions to make? Go ahead and make comments to this article. If the suggestions are good enough I shall use all the channels available to me for reaching out to Behen Mayawatiji and give the list of all the valueable suggestions to her.