Fences, beams arrive for Abdul Kalam memorial

RAMESWARAM: Work on the late President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam’s memorial at his tomb site here moved a step forward on Sunday, with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) carting the set of iron beams and fences that will firmly mark out the boundary walls of the proposed grand memorial.

These iron structures made by the DRDO, an organsation with which Dr Kalam was involved for many years while directing the country’s integrated missile development programme, arrived here from Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh on Sunday morning.

These structures will be erected all along the perimeter of the boundary for the memorial for which the foundation stone had been laid by DRDO in December 2015, as part of the preliminary works.

The Tamil Nadu government has allotted 1.36 acres of land for the memorial at Peykarumbu, which falls within Thangachimadam panchayat in Rameswaram island, where the mortal remains of Dr Kalam was laid to rest in July last year after he had passed away following a sudden cardiac arrest while giving a lecture at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Meghalaya’s capital of Shillong.

Since then Dr Kalam’s tomb site is being swarmed by visitors and tourists who flock to Rameswaram, amidst the local people’s expectations that a grand and fitting memorial would come up there in memory of the late President of India.

Though work on the memorial has been progressing as snail pace so far, with the arrival of these fencing materials today, local people have expressed the hope that the construction work on the memorial building would also be started at the earliest.