President Clinton signed on Monday a bill cleared by the Congress approving construction of a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi. The shrine will incorporate a statue of India's tallest leader. The memorial will be located in a triangular park opposite the Indian Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, otherwise known as Embassy Row, a broad street lined with foreign diplomatic missions.

The statue, commissioned by ICCR and created by sculptor Ram Sutar in India, will be flown in time for a January 26 inauguration, Indian officials said.

The project though has still to cross one last hurdle. Despite the Congress having passed the bill and the President signing it, it transpires the embassy still needs the permission of Washington's park authorities to start work on the triangle.

Embassy sources said the bill merely mentioned the memorial would come up onfederal land without identifying the plot. But the embassy had an understanding with park authorities and permission would be a formality, they added. The Embassy will also need to raise about $ 100,000 for landscaping and lay-out of the park as they shape the memorial. Community leaders are expected to chip in.

Washington DC is already studded with elegant and imposing monuments, including memorials to some of its greatest presidents -- Jefferson, Lincoln, and more recently, Roosevelt. The construction of each monument has been accompanied by the usual quota of controversies (there was a big to-do about whether the Roosevelt statue should show him on a wheelchair since his handicap was well-disguised during his lifetime), and the Gandhi memorial was no exception.

The project was first proposed more than 15 years ago and kept getting bounced each year because of various reasons. It was coming to fruition earlier this year and was slated to be installed on August 15 in the Golden Jubilee year, but the May11 nuclear tests further derailed the project.

In fact, following the nuclear tests, it became moot whether the US legislature and the political system was inclined to take up the matter at all.

But consistent lobbying by the Embassy and the community saw the 100-strong India caucus, led by Congressmen Frank Pallone and Bill McCollum push the bill and get it through a Congress that was preoccupied with many other things.

Ironically, the Gandhi memorial will come up a few hundred yards from a statue of Churchill, the only other foreign leader memorialized in Washington.