ATHAGARH: Once the pride of Badamda, the sundial installed at the tehsildar office is in dire need of repair. Installed by the erstwhile king of Badamba, Narayan Chandra Birabar Mangaraj Mohapatra in 1933, the rod of the sundial has broken making it inoperative.
This apart the stone surface on which the antique stands has developed cracks. A thick layer of moss also covers the surface. Recalling the sundial’s past grandeur, senior citizen and social activist, Amiya Kumar Pattnaik said as a kid, he used to keep track of time by looking at the device.
Principal of Mohan Subudhi College Kumaresh Rath said during his school days, his teachers had taken him and his classmates to see the sundial and explained its significance.
Senior lecturer of the college, Mayadhar Rath said the sundial has immense archaeological significance as any other historical monument of the State.
“Unless urgent measures are initiated, a prized part of our State’s priceless past will fade into oblivion,” he said.
A sundial is a timekeeping device, that shows the time of day by the position of the shadow of some object exposed to the sun’s rays. Sundials could be horizontal, vertical or equatorial depending on the orientation of their dial planes.
The sundial of Badamba is of equatorial type where the dial is kept parallel to the Earth’s equator. For this, the dial is tilted by an angle nearly 21 degree equal to the local latitude from the vertical line towards the South.
The style is aligned perpendicular to the dial plane in a direction parallel to the Earth’s axis and hence it directly points to the Pole Star in the sky in its Northward direction.
As the Sun goes in its daily orbit across the sky, the shadow keeps on moving over the graduated dial indicating time.
A similar device was installed at Badamba palace in 1935 but the necessary repair and maintenance was done by Trivikram Chandra Birabar Mangaraj Mohapatra, a member of the royal family recently.