A custom-made Volvo bus is being used to transport the 41-ft marvel to Bhavnagar in Gujarat where the statue will be installed in a couple of months
A custom-made Volvo bus is being used to transport the 41-ft marvel to Bhavnagar in Gujarat where the statue will be installed in a couple of months
It took 14 months for the National Award-winning architect Ashok Gudigar to carve a 41-ft marvel out of a single block of granite weighing about 400 tonnes.
Shri Kund Kund Kahan Digambar Jain Swadhyay Mandir Trust in Gujarat planned to build the giant idol of Bahubali. After hunting for a stone for about two years, they finally found one here and started working on it.
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| The Bahubali idol stands 41-feet tall, is 14-feet wide and 6.5-feet in thickness |
Manish Shah, one of the key members involved in the mission, said that the entire project was funded by the trust." He added, "It's a matter of pride for the Jain community."
The Bahubali statue will be installed at Songadh, a village in Bhavnagar.
It was taken to Gujarat last night on a custom-made Volvo bus and it will take several days to reach its destination, as the huge size of the idol won't allow the vehicle to travel more than 20 km a day.
Gudigar, who took painstaking effort to carve the idol, said, "Although the work is just 80 per cent complete, the idol looks very beautiful."
Explaining why theu00a0 work is still incomplete, he said, "We didn't want to take any risk, as the idol may getu00a0 a few scratches during transportation."
Interestingly, it's the second largest idol in the country after the one in Shravanabelagola.
