BENGALURU: Environmentalists in Mysore are seeing red over the proposal of the JDS-Congress coalition government’s proposal to build a 125 ft statue of ‘Cauvery Mata’ expected to cost Rs 1,200 crore at the Krishna Raja Sagar (KRS) reservoir in Mandya district.
While Mysoreans call it a project which is disturbing the heritage of the area, Twitterati have called it a shameful waste of money and cheap politics played in the name of the Cauvery.
“This entire project at the cost of heritage is unnecessary. KRS is not just a tourism site but it also has a heritage value, something like Disney land to overshadow this is unacceptable,” said Sudhir CS, an advocate from Mysore.
Supporting the advocate, wildlife warden Rajkumar D in Mysuru expressed concern over any kind of construction projects around dams that could damage the ecology and said that it needs to be checked if that kind of permission could be granted. Others like environmental engineer Dr K S Lokesh said the move was a good one if executed scientifically and with a sustainable plan in place. However, he said that he had his doubts if this would be the case.
Twitterati mostly expressed displeasure over this project with some of them terming it a political game.
Though Karnataka Minister D K Shivakumar, clarified that the statue of mother Cauvery will not be built from the government funds but through a private-public partnership model, social media was sceptical.