Sulochana Gadgil is a meteorologist with a large and influential body of work on the Indian monsoon. Born in 1944 in Pune, she studied mathematics in India and the USA. After obtaining a PhD in Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, she worked as a Research Fellow in MIT. In 1971, she returned to India and […]
A look at how Bangalore can meet its growing water needs Bangalore is not new to water problems: the city’s water consumption is monstrously growing and its groundwater levels are rampantly depleting. Water pollution levels are a matter of grave concern, with Bellandur and Varthur lakes intermittently catching fire and spitting froth. The demand for […]
Kusala Rajendran, a seismologist at IISc, takes us into the world of earthquakes, and tells us why predicting them is far-fetched at the moment Inspecting trenches in a no man’s land, at the India-Pakistan border, stood Kusala Rajendran and her husband CP Rajendran. Surrounded by the BSF jawans, the Rajendrans were donning the detective’s hat: […]
Veena Srinivasan is a Senior Fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bangalore, where she leads the Water, Land and Society Programme. Her research interests include the impacts of urbanisation on water resources, an issue that comes back to haunt major Indian cities and enter the national discourse every […]
The first national effort to understand the meteorological phenomenon For about four months from May to September 1990, the Indian summer monsoon was the subject of unprecedented nationwide attention. While the monsoon winds raced from Kerala to the northwest of India in 35 days, less than its usual 45, researchers on land, air and sea […]
Syed Ameenulla, who joined IISc as a lab assistant and went on to be a scientific officer, recalls his involvement in the Institute’s monsoon experiments In the monsoon of 1979, Chandipur beach in Balasore, Odisha was host to a small group of researchers from Bangalore. The team, from IISc and the National Aeronautical Laboratory (NAL), […]
An IISc scientist’s work on a local solution for water and power Baliram Nag and I arrive on his bike at the Bastar District Collector’s residence, at the end of a leafy, secluded road in Jagdalpur. As we make our way past the security guards, they greet Bali warmly and ask him where the “vaigyanik” […]
A 2016 Indo-UK monsoon experiment collected a detailed set of data that is still being analysed On 27 July 2016, the oceanographic research vessel Sindhu Sadhana sailed back to Chennai through terrible weather after a month at sea in the southern Bay of Bengal. Field experiments in the ocean are often risky and challenging during […]
Studying how a changing monsoon could affect our biodiversity Scientists predict that the current bout of climate change, induced by human activities, will severely impact the monsoon. How will the expected change in this weather system affect India’s rich biological diversity? Given the complexity of both the monsoon and anthropogenic climate change, the answer is […]
In the second part of our series on cryptography, we dive into why we are experiencing increasing privacy violations In early February this year, an ethical hacker called Victor Gevers revealed that he could track the movements of 2.5 million Chinese Xinjiang Muslims in real-time on a site that belonged to a Chinese surveillance company, […]
