UNESCO has listed the 106-year-old observatory at Langat Singh College in Muzaffarpur, Bihar on its list of the world’s most important observatories of endangered world cultural heritage. The college authorities have requested the state government to preserve the old Astro lab as a specimen of the glorious past of the state and also to preserve and promote it as a heritage structure. The UNESCO team member informed him that the astronomical observatory at Muzaffarpur is now on the UNESCO list and it has been uploaded on the UNESCO site.
History of the astronomical observatory:
According to Sinha, the observatory was built in 1916 at his 123-year-old university, now Bhimrao Ambedkar, which he is affiliated with Bihar University. “Probably the first planetarium in India was also set up at the university in 1946. The observatory and planetarium were fully functional until the early 1970s. However, it started to decrease gradually over time. Now it’s not fully functional and most of the observatory’s expensive instruments are lost or scrapped,” he said.