A sea of humanity braved traffic snarls and inched its way towards the Sardar Sarovar Project site where Home Minister L K Advani relaunched construction on the Rs 20,000 crore project. It was a befitting tribute to Sardar Vallabhai Patel who conceived the project in 1946, on his 126th birth anniversary on Tuesday. Largely ignored for the past four years, this small village saw more than two-lakh people come in to witness the relaunch. The project, built to tame the mighty Narmada, and channel its water for constructive purposes. Is billed the ''lifeline'' of this parched state. According to official sources, nearly 8,000 vehicles had reached the parking site, jamming traffic for several hours. The state government, which had pulled all stops to organise this much-awaited event, had deployed hundreds of policemen. About 3,200 buses of the state road transport corporation ferried the public free of cost from various parts of the state. Despite the traffic diversions in place, government vehicles and those ferrying newspersons from Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad, took five hours on Monday to reach Vadodara, only 110 km away. On Tuesday, it was worse, with several journalists, who had started from Vadodara at 5 pm, trekking nearly ten km to reach the venue, due to traffic snarls. Bureau Report