The Odisha State Maritime Museum here, the first of its kind in India, is now getting ready to be thrown open to public on the Utkal Diwas on Monday. Spread over an area of more than four acres, the museum is housed in the erstwhile Maritime Engineering Workshop at Jobra on the right embankment of Mahanadi.

Developed with the assistance of the Indian National Trust for Art and Culture (Intach), the museum has come up at a cost of nearly Rs 11 crore. It has 13 galleries showcasing the maritime artifacts of ancient Kalinga, including the archaic machines of the workshop. With a view to reviving the maritime glory of Kalinga and preserve the rich heritage of the State, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik had laid the foundation-stone of the museum in May 2007. The Chief Minister had hoped that the museum would be ready for public viewing in three years. However, it took six years for completion.

“Due to certain inherent problems and the need to give an architectural look to the museum, it was decided to include a patch of adjacent land to the museum to give a symmetrical exterior to it, for which the project got delayed,” said Executive Engineer of irrigation department Subrat Das, who is overseeing the work here. The additional structure escalated the budget of the museum from Rs 7.65 crore to Rs 10.73 crore, Das said.

Tracing the history of the Maritime Engineering Workshop, Das said the sophisticated workshop served as the irrigation and navigation headquarters of the British regime in Odisha, Bihar and Bengal. “In an endeavour to preserve the workshop as a living testimony of maritime glory and prosperity of the region, the State Government decided to convert the 143-year-old workshop into a museum,” Das said, adding that the foundation-stone of the workshop was laid on the New Year’s Day of 1869.

"Since Cuttack stood as a nodal point of irrigation and inland waterways of the region in those days, the concept of establishing a workshop at Jobra was felt necessary by the British engineers for repair and maintenance of machineries and equipment of the water vessels. It is a well-known fact that during those days, the engineering skills of people of the State on irrigation, construction of canals and management of water resources and building water vessels called Boita were highly developed,” Das said.

Truly to serve as a living testimony to Odisha’s maritime glory, the museum has an ‘Introduction’ gallery where the pictures of boats from ancient days to modern era are on display with brief writings about the phases of development from country-made boats to sophisticated cargo vessels, including the fighter vessels to take care of the pirates.

The second gallery is on maritime history of the erstwhile Kalinga displaying replicas of boats, sculptures of important monuments, pottery works, weights and measurement instruments, visual art and folk dance and music. While the third one is a boat-building gallery, the fourth gallery showcases umpteen numbers of rituals performed by carpenters during the time of building the boats.

The other galleries display artifacts comprising navigation parts including that of propellants, anchors and funnels which are the essential parts of the power boats. Similarly, there is a gallery which is exclusively displaying the rich cultural heritage of the State. Besides, the museum also has a boat shed, an aquarium and theme parks with landscapes.