Toll gates widened to transport mega stone block

New Delhi: Some of the toll plaza gates on highways had to be "temporarily dismantled" to allow passage to a 100-ftlong truck carrying the monolithic block of granite for the statue of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose from Telangana to Delhi. Rajat Mehta, director of Delhi-based Granite Studio India, which supplied the telephone black stone sourced from a quarry in Khammam in Telangana, said a ‘makeshift road’ had to be built to move it from the quarry to a highway for transportation. "It was a mammoth block of stone, weighing 280 metric tonnes (MT) and 32-ft-long. It was 11-ft-high and 8.5-ft-wide from which the image of Netaji was carved out. But getting it to Delhi entailed a whole host of challenges," he said.

The granite monolith was chiselled to produce a statue of Bose which weighed 65 MT. PM Modi unveiled the statue of Bose, that sits in historic canopy in front of the India Gate here, on Thursday evening. The massive truck was specially designed to carry the granite block to the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) here -- a distance of 1,665 kilometres, the Culture Ministry earlier said. "The stretch from the quarry to the national highway was 'kuccha' and a makeshift road had to be built in a short period of time to move the stone to the highway," he said. As many as 42 tyres of the 100-ftlong truck burst on the way and 72 hours were lost due to this. The truck passed through five states to reach Delhi," Mehta said. A team of sculptors spent 26,000 man hours of "intense artistic endeavour" to carve the 28-ft-tall statue of Bose, according to the Ministry of Culture. "While the statue's carving was a labour of love, bringing it here was no easy feat. The truck was so huge that, at a couple of places, some toll plaza gates on highways had to be temporarily dismantled, where turns were sharp, so that itcould negotiate it without the risk of hitting anything or anyone,” Mehta said.