Ram Vanji Sutar, a Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri recipient, now has another achievement to his credit. He’s the man behind the tallest statue in the world – the statue of unity. The 93-year-old man took great care to ensure that the statue's face resembles Sardar Patel’s facial features. He studied over 2,000 photographs of the leader to finally design the statue’s face. From an early age, Ram Vanji Sutar had known that he wanted to be a sculptor and he grew up dreaming of creating a statue that would dwarf French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s 305-ft neoclassical robed female figure. The Statue of Unity, Sutar says, is by far the most challenging project he has undertaken.
