Women Marshals of Science

Raindrops to Kitchen Over the Next Few Years, Swati Basu Will Be Steering Science in the Country From the Office of the PSA

- Archita Bhatta

How is the rain formed, how do the clouds move? These were the tales from a meteorologist father to his daughter every day on her way to school. The curiosity inspired by those lovely moments shaped her entire thought process.

So for the youngest among the three sisters who always found it exciting to tread into unexplored territories, meteorology, then a field dominated by men was a natural choice.

“My father taught me that there was science in everything, even the kitchen was a laboratory and this also helped be develop my love for cooking,” Dr Swati Basu pointed out.

But despite her propensity to delve into the wonders of nature, she strongly believed that science needs to have an application and is for the benefit of mankind. This is what drew her to applied physics, a subject which had just been introduced at hindu College then.

Soon after she had completed her masters, she joined the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences which had just been started at IIT Delhi, for her PhD where she studied atmospheric pollution over Delhi with the help of existing atmospheric models.

The need of the hour was a talent who could give atmospheric modelling in India its due place and the discipline had got its star. Basu soon joined the National Centre for Medium Range forecasting (NCMRwf) which needed brains to develop their modelling system to forecast weather for three to seven days in advance.