Jayanta Sthanapati

The Birla Industrial and Technological Museum (BITM), the first major science museum in India, was established by the CSIR in Kolkata in 1959. After a few years, the BITM authorities realised that people from distant areas were not visiting the museum. They decided, “If people cannot visit the museum, let the museum visit the people at their doorstep.” As a solution to this challenge, BITM launched a travelling science exhibition called the Mobile Science Museum (MSM) in 1965, titled “Our Familiar Electricity”. The MSM exhibition featured 30 exhibits, each housed in a cabinet and displayed on stands in an empty hall. BITM subsequently organised a few more such exhibitions. However, the process included packing, loading, unloading, unpacking, assembling, and displaying the exhibits at each site, which proved cumbersome and labour-intensive…read more on NOPR