Kolkata, Mar 4 (IANS): The Geological Survey of India (GSI), here on Monday, launched 22 permanent global positioning system (GPS) stations across India to identify seismically hazardous zones and encourage mapping activities.
"The GSI has taken a stride to establish and maintain a network of continuously operating 35 permanent GPS stations in a phased manner. So far, 22 GPS permanent stations have been set up and another 13 will be operational by March 2020," Director General Dinesh Gupta said on GSI's 169th Foundation Day.
The 22 GPS-Geodetic (pertaining to Geodesy, the science of earth measurement) observatories are located in Kolkata, Thiruvananthapuram, Jaipur, Pune, Dehradun, Chennai, Jabalpur, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Raipur, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Gandhinagar Vishakhapatnam, Agartala, Itanagar, Mangan, Jammu, Lucknow, Nagpur, Shillong and Little Andaman.
The new 13 stations will be located in Aizawl, Faridabad, Uttarkashi, Pithoragarh, Cooch Behar, Zawar, North Andaman, Middle Andaman, South Andaman, Ranchi, Mangalore, Imphal and Chitradurga.
"These stations are meant to delineate high strain zones for earthquake probability, determine a seismic motion on faults that may lead to a rupture and produce thematic maps with high positional accuracy," said Gupta.
The GSI is also keen on getting youngsters interested in geology and has taken several initiatives for this, the first being introduction of geology at the school level.
"We have prepared the syllabus and requested the HRD Ministry to introduce the subject in secondary and higher secondary school education boards," said Gupta.
The organisation has launched a platform called "Bhuvisamvad" under the Ministry of Mines to facilitate interaction between geo-scientists and university and college students.
The GSI has also signed a memorandum of understanding with IIT-Hyderabad, and ISM-Dhanbad that envisages capacity building and collaborative research leading to awarding of PhD degrees.
It has also launched an internship programme (GSI-IP) on a stipend basis for final year post-graduate students of earth sciences.
To give a fillip to mineral targeting, the GSI has launched multi-sensor national aero-geophysical data acquisition for mineral deposits in Rajasthan, Gujarat, MP, UP, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra.
The data will be in the public domain by May.
"Earlier we had shallow targets. Now we are looking into deeper targets. Our aim is to contribute to the GDP by boosting mineral exploration in the country," he said.
For this, the GSI has handed over 20 mineral exploration reports worth Rs 79,560 crore to the governments of Odisha, Rajasthan, MP, Haryana, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala.