SASARAM: A sundial installed in 1871 at Bihar’s Dehri Mechanical Workshop and Industrial Training Institute was stolen on Tuesday. The robbery has turned the spotlight on the neglected institute, which the British established to make and repair steamers and boats for transportation of valuable minerals, ores, and forest products from Kaimur forests to the factories across India and abroad.

“There was no such watch in Bihar,” said Manish Singh, a local resident.

Once 4,550 merchants and 530 passenger steamers and boats transported 84,000 tonnes of ores and goods and 4,600 people monthly to Ara and Buxar through a canal system from the river Sone at Dehri.

The Sone was of great importance to the British Indian economy, said Shyam Sundar Tiwary, a historian and an expert on the Sone Valley Civilisation. The ore and forest products were loaded on big vessels in Ara and Buxar and shipped via the Ganga to factories and markets.

The main dock of the Dehri Ghat was abandoned in the 1960s as rail and road transport improved. A century back, the East India Irrigation and Canal Company Limited was formed in 1867 to control the water transportation in the Sone canal system.

Established in 1871, the institute also prepared steel sheets and was the lone supplier of sluice gates used in dams across Bihar and Jharkhand. It also fabricated engines under the supervision of foreign engineers, Tiwary said.

An Industrial Training Institute (ITI) was also opened on the campus of the workshop and 20 seats were reserved for foreign apprentices to learn the vessel building technology.

The workshop and ITI buildings have been reduced to ruins. The hostel of the ITI is under Bihar Military Police’s control.