The Union Minister of Mines Shri Dinsha J. Patel will chair the 3rd Geoscience Advisory Council (GAC) meeting here tomorrow. The meeting will be attended by the members of GAC drawn from various Central Ministries, Scientific Institutions, including the Geological Survey of India and other nominated non-official members.
The GAC has been constituted in 2011, as per the recommendations of the High Powered Committee (HPC) of the Government of India constituted in January 2008. Based on the recommendations of the HPC, it was decided that agencies like Geological Survey of India (GSI), Atomic Mineral Division of DAE, ONGC, Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, Central Ground Water Board, National Geophysical research Institute, NHPC, Coal India (CMPDI), Universities etc engaged or dealing with Geoscience aspect in the country should jointly endeavour for a better-integrated and holistic approach and to:
- Identify critical areas in field of geoscience in short, medium and long term periods and develop strategies to enable the challenge to be addressed.
- Work out priorities for over the next 5, 10 and 20 years periods.
- Develop and utilize platforms of interaction/collaboration with other national and international organizations.
- Suggest changes, on continuous basis about infrastructural changes, skill mix and integrative approach to enable GSI to meet existing and emerging challenges.
It view of the above it was considered appropriate to constitute a `Geoscience Advisory Council` to advise the Ministry of Mines on geoscientific policy matters in general and the` role and direction of the Geological Survey of India in particular with following terms of reference, which includes-
- Advising the Ministry of Mines on geoscientific policy initiatives including synergetic coordination with similar activities in other institutions;
- Prioritizing GSI thrust activities, recommending new technologies and methodologies and geoscientific collaborations;
- Identifying new areas for fundamental and multidisciplinary geoscience (including global climatic change) and recommending methods for optimizing resources for scientific R&D in such areas, including building of geoscientific partnerships at national and international levels with research, academic and policy making institution;
- Recommending networking and synergy with regard to sharing of scientific information including organisation of events, publication policies, Internet application etc.
- To recommend ways of popularizing geoscience for building an informed citizenry.
The `Geoscience Advisory Council` is a High Powered Committee with the Union Minister/ Minister of State for Mines as Chairman and Secretary, Ministry of Mines as Vice Chairman. Geoscience Advisory Council provides a platform to the Administrators, Earth Scientists, and Academicians to deliberate and suggest the gap areas in our present system of pursuing Geoscience and the direction which organizations, individually and collectively, should pursue to meet future challenges.
An enormous amount of Geoscience data has been collected over last 150 years, in different formats and scale by different organizations. A major challenge is to properly collate this data but primarily it has to be agreed upon by different agencies working under different Ministries to agree to share and collate such huge but valuable geoscience data.