New Delhi: Union minister Nitin Gadkari said that he was against the government funding a Shivaji statue in Nagpur as “people do not value things which are given for free”.
He was speaking at the Shivaji statue’s ground-breaking ceremony at Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur University (RTMNU) on Sunday, June 18.
According to news agency PTI, the statue is being funded by a body called the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Smarak Samiti. The last two words roughly translate from Marathi to ‘momument committee’.
“I welcome the move of the committee which is constructing the statue from the contribution given by the people. I feel that government funds should not be used for erecting the statue. People do not value things which are given for free,” PTI quoted Gadkari as saying.
He added, “There is no need to seek financial support from the Nagpur Municipal Corporation, the Nagpur Improvement Trust, the Maharashtra government or the RTMNU.”
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On Saturday, June 17, Gadkari addressed a book launch event in Nagpur and referred to the newly-elected Karnataka government’s decisions to revise its textbooks as “unfortunate”.
“It is unfortunate that the chapters on Dr Hedgewar and Swatantra Veer Savarkar have been removed from the school syllabus. There is nothing more painful than this,” he said according to news agency ANI.
The Congress government in Karnataka decided on June 17 to revise changes to its textbooks that were introduced after Gadkari’s party, the BJP, came to power in the state in 2019.
Among the Congress’s 18 revisions are the removal of a lesson written by RSS founder K.B. Hedgewar and assertions that linguistic and regional pride are detrimental to the idea of nationalism, the Hindu reported.