A surprise visit to the Sardar Sarovar Dam, and up the Statue of Unity to the viewing gallery

One of those delightfully constructed myths about automotive journalism is that it is a glamourous life. While there is no doubt that it is fun, what is often missed out on those Instagram posts and Twitter updates is what happens behind the scenes. Such as 4 AM wake-up calls with hotel staff banging on your door because the phone isn’t working. And then spending two hours in a bus that should have been scrapped five years ago with cold air leaking out of every hole but the proper vents. Just to get to a flag-off venue and begin driving. Could be worse, I’ve waited for hours in airports, haggled with airline staff who barely understand English in order to get onto a plane and been driven around by drivers who considered themselves the third Schumacher brother in cars that were held together with duct tape. Oh yeah, there was this one-time I crossed a shark-infested sea in a leaky fishing boat with five supermodels. No really! Now, that was an assignment. Anyhow, you get the picture, before the smooth there is a lot of rough. 

Anyway, long story short, we made it to the ‘Statue of Unity’ just before eight in the morning. A bit late, but just about. It was a bit of a jamboree with Hyundai India having invited 15 publications, magazines and television shows to participate in the Great India Drive and everyone, including me, went straight to our cars to load up and start taking pictures trying to get the mightily impressive Statue in the background. Hyundai India’s Managing Director, S.S Kim then flagged off each of the participants individually and then I was told of a surprise. While I fully expected to visit the statue and travel to the viewing gallery, we were also going to get a VIP tour of the Sardar Sarovar Dam. And honestly, while the statue is impressive, the dam is even more so. 

Now, for folks of my generation, the Sardar Sarovar Dam project was the lightning rod for environmentalists of the day. It made the protests about the Aarey Forest that happened over the past couple of months look like chicken feed. No discussion of the dam is frankly complete without one name, that of Medha Patkar, the leader of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. And while we can debate ad nauseum about the importance of large dam projects that uproot people from ancestral land, projects that damage the environment and so on, Patkar did however ensure that the displaced got a fair deal. I have written editorials and columns on India’s moral imperative to lift millions out of poverty and how that will have an environmental cost, but I will not get into that right here.

A bit about the dam, it was apparently envisioned by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel himself, and while the great man died in 1950, the foundation stone was laid down by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1961. Ironically, the dam’s full water capacity, the height of the reservoir was only achieved in 2017 during Narendra Modi’s first term as Prime Minister, an interesting link between the two Prime Ministers. Many factual resources are available about the dam online, but it is extremely impressive to walk on top of it, and I made a short video that you can view below, with some more facts and figures. Alongside the Three Gorges dam in China and the Aswan dam in Egypt, the Sardar Sarovar dam is one of the most spectacular and impressive dams in the world and it is only fitting that the statue of the great man looks down on the dam.

The Statue of Unity folks are trying to build a resort around the monument, which we were told has between 25,000-35,000 visitors daily, these are figures for normal days. As I would see in the coming days, this is several hundred times the number of visitors that actually visit Gujarat’s UNESCO World Heritage sites. Some of these places are supposed to be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s birth anniversary in a few days from the time we visited and the finishing touches were being applied. We were taken to the ‘Cactus Garden’ which had a whole range of cacti and succulents, the only one that I did not notice there was the famous ‘Saguaro’ cactus other than on the entrance gate. The Saguaro, as cactus lovers would know is the famous type of cactus that is found in the deserts of the southwestern United States. There was a butterfly park as well, but that was still getting the finishing touches so we skipped that and went off to visit the statue itself.

Now, the ‘Statue of Unity’ itself, and the man, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s first Home Minister. For those of us growing up in Delhi, Sardar Patel was the name of one of Delhi’s elite schools - Sardar Patel Vidyalaya and it was only later towards the end of middle school that we learnt about the importance of the man in uniting the nation by cajoling and even forcing certain states - Junagadh and Hyderabad as examples to join the Union of India. His role cannot be ignored, and in Gujarat, he stands tall as one of the greatest Gujaratis in modern times, even though there was another Gujarati from Porbandar who became the ‘Father of the Nation’. But, we will talk of the Mahatma later.

The Statue stands 182 meters tall and is the tallest statue in the world, and including its 52 meter base, it stands an impressive 240 meters high. It is much higher than the second-tallest statue built, the 128 meter tall statue of the Spring Temple Buddha in Lushan China. In fact, most of the top ten statues of the world are that of the Buddha and ironically there are no large statues of Gautama in the land where he was born, again that is another story for another time. The really ironic fact about the statue is that the 6500 unpolished bronze plates that make up the exterior were actually cast in China as India did not have the casting technology and facilities to cast such large pieces of bronze when Narendra Modi, then the Chief Minister of Gujarat announced the building of the statue on October 2013. From announcement to completion, the statue took five years to build and was a tremendous feat of engineering executed by Larsen&Toubro, one of India’s top engineering firms (even if it bears the names of its Swedish founders).  The main structure of the statue are two large structural pillars starting at the base and these are those inside which the lifts to the viewing gallery run.

The Statue is built on a small island downstream of the dam, and the path to the statue is a covered walkway with travelators to make life easy for the thousands of daily visitors. There is a museum at the base of the statue which details the building process of the monument and the design, and a replica of the head of the statue which was designed by Ram Sutar and is based on the statue of Sardar Patel standing outside Ahmedabad airport. Once inside, you can buy tickets to go up to the viewing gallery located at a height of 135 meters - inside the right chest of the statue between the second and third buttons. The viewing gallery offers a fantastic view of the dam and the reservoir behind it and will be a lovely place from which to view the sound and light show in the evening, if that is allowed. At the end of the tour, we went to the feet of the statue and could touch and feel the bronze panels, unpolished as they, and will start oxidising in the next ten-odd years. This will lead to the statue goings green, much like the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour.

After a morning well spent, it was getting a bit late. Talish was going to arrive at around 12 noon and the drive to the airport, even in a car which I could drive a lot faster than a bus would take 90 minutes and it was almost 11 in the morning. I had to find Manish, our cameraperson and rush out after a quick coffee at the food court. In conclusion, I do believe that statue is an impressive sight that you should go visit and the entertainment park, hotels and convention centre that are coming up beside. If I have one complaint, the access roads from Vadodara can be improved, but they were still a work in progress. 

Next Time: Champaner, and the lost city!