New content on India Water Portal: Research studies of the National Institute of Hydrology

Portal Staff member Vijay Krishna writes:

At the invitation of the Director Dr. R.D.Singh, Minakshi Arora and Siraj Kesar of the Hindi Water Portal team, and myself visited the National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee in February. The institute is a premier research institute of the Government of India working on water and comes under the Ministry of Water Resources. The institute has a branch in Belgaum, Karnataka that focuses on hydrology in hard rock areas. The main campus is in the small town of Roorkee in Uttarakhand, next to IIT Roorkee. Roorkee has a long history of engineering and water engineering in particular, and the first engineering college in India was set up in Roorkee. NIH conducts research on several areas. One of their recent ongoing projects is on the study of groundwater quality in all the large cities of the country, study commissioned by CPCB. We saw a large bound volume containing the results of the first phase of the study. (No doubt this study would be of interest to lots of people. However we were not able to get access to the soft copy of this study). The institute also has a well-equipped lab for doing hydrology studies using the radioactive emissions as a marker. For example, radioactivity can be used to glean useful knowledge about the flows of groundwater. The director and staff of the institute were all very hospitable and showed us around several of the labs at the institute and explained the research activities of the Institute. The highlight of the trip for us was getting a set of more than 200 research papers from the Institute which covers a lot of their research activities from 1996 to 2001. These papers are now available on the Portal at https://www.indiawaterportal.org/data/res/research.html We have not done much work on classification of the papers by type at this point, but a spreadsheet containing the titles of all the papers can be downloaded here: https://www.indiawaterportal.org/data/res/NIH_Studies_Complete.xls

 . To our knowledge these papers have not been available so far in soft copy to the general public. We feel that placing this information in the public domain will serve a significant purpose in making widely available work done in the sector that people may not be aware of. We welcome your comments on the usefulness of these papers, and your suggestions on making more such research widely available. We acknowledge NIH for making available these papers to India Water Portal and thank them for their hospitality during our visit. We also feel that it is unfortunate that so much government research and data outputs are not easily accessible in the public domain. Also view a short film in Hindi of the Director of National Institute of Hydrology on Climate Change: