An online petition demanding the Maharashtra and Union government to drop the plan of spending Rs 3,600 crore on Shivaji memorial in the Arabian Sea and instead use the funds for the betterment of railways has gone viral. The petition within days of filing has received the support of more than 28,000 people. Vipin Vijayan has filed the petition and has addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Maharashtra Devendra Fadnavis, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal, Shiv Sena chief Udhav Thackeray, Indian National Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi and Western Railway.
The petition is receiving a good response in the aftermath of Elphinstone Road stampede on September 29, which claimed 23 lives. “Government always points to the paucity of funds when we talk about fixing the railways in Mumbai. Then we see 3600 crores being allocated to make a memorial in the Arabian Sea, which is as good as flushing that much money down the drain. So divert all that funds to fixing trains so that we will not lose lives while traveling. Use that amount to modernize the existing train system and make some real change,” reads the petition.
The petition also highlights the fact that the government is wasting money just to ‘ape the West’ instead of focusing on the priorities of the citizens. It further adds, “I am so sure that if Shivaji Maharaj was alive today even he wouldn’t have wanted a memorial when people were losing lives. I am not against the memorial of the great king its just that the same could be financed through some other ways like a BOT model or maybe a Bond. A better option would be to restore the forts which were actually used by him during his fights. But we have to ape the west and build something similar to the Statue of Liberty.”
The Shivaji Memorial is a project under the flagship programmes of the BJP-led government to honor the 17-century warrior king and founder of the Maratha Empire Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. On December 24, 2016, PM Narendra Modi had laid the foundation stone by performing the ‘jal-pujan’.
