India's Billion-dollar Battle to Build the World's Biggest Statue

AFP - The world's biggest statue is rising in a remote corner of India to honour an independence hero but it could quickly be outdone by a monument to a Hindu warrior king in the sea off Mumbai.

In a burst of nationalist fervour, around one billion dollars is being spent on the two giant effigies, each more than twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty.

A 182-metre-high (600-foot-high) tribute to independence icon Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in Gujarat state will be the first to dwarf the Spring Temple Buddha in China, currently the world's biggest statue at 128 metres (420 feet) in height.

Pick-axes are also swinging for a 212-metre-high likeness of 17th-century king Chhatrapati Shivaji, resplendent on a horse and brandishing a sword, which should dominate the Mumbai shoreline from 2021.

An army of 2,500 workers -- including several hundred Chinese labourers -- is toiling around the clock to put 5,000 squares of bronze cladding on the figure of Patel so it can be ready for inauguration on October 31 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The 29.9-billion-rupee ($430-million) "Statue of Unity" overlooking the isolated Sardar Sarovar Dam is a pet project of Modi.

He has predicted it will attract "hordes" of tourists, as the Statue of Liberty does in New York.

Visitors will be able to access a viewing gallery 153 metres up -- about chest height on the huge standing figure.

But they will have to travel 250 kilometres (150 miles) from the state's main city of Allahabad to get there.