Statue of Unity

An international consortium, led by Turner Project Management — the project management consultants of Burj Khalifa — signed an agreement with the Gujarat government for “engineering, design and contract management” to construct the 182-metre-high Statue of Unity of Sardar Patel.
Dubai’s Burj Khalifa happens to be the world’s tallest building, while the Sardar statue, in the midst of Narmada river, is proposed as the tallest statue of the world.
Other partners in the consortium, apart from USbased Turner, include Michael Graves and Associates, also from the US, and Mindheart from Germany.
The Statue of Unity will cost Rs 2,500 crore, the agreement says, and it will be built under the supervision of the consortium, which will charge Rs 56 crore for the job.
During the first year and three months, the consortium will prepare master plan of the project and finalize contract bid documents. In the next 40 months, it will supervise the construction activity, and in the last two months, it will hand over the statue. In all, it will take 56 months to complete the Statue of Unity.
The formal agreement, signed in the Sardar Sarovar Narmada Nigam Ltd (SSNNL) in Sachivalaya, says, the consortium will carry out technical and financial feasibility of building the statue, including its pre-investment planning, detail a financial and revenue model, prepare a tourism plan for the area surrounding the statue, and manage the bid process for choosing the contractor to build the statue.
Apart from the statue, the agreement says, the consortium will have to conceptualize “the bridge that will connect the statue in the Narmada river, off the Narmada dam on Sadhu bet, the approximately 3.5 km road connecting the project to the town of Kevadia, the memorial and the visitor centre buildings, the memorial garden, the hotel and convention centre, and miscellaneous support structures.”
For all this, the agreement says, the consortium will have to supervise on a continuous basis in order to ensure that the work is of the highest order, carry out insitu and ex-situ inspection, and assist dispute resolution.