Address by Sh. B.L. Verma, Dy. Director General of Meteorology,

 India Meteorological Department,

Regional Meteorological Centre,

 New Delhi

Hon’ble Minister Janab Ghulam Hassan Mir Sahab

Prof. Anwar Alam, VC Sher-e-Kashmir Univ. of Science and Technology

Mrs Naseem Lankar, Div. Commissioner, Kashmir,

AVM Dr. Ajit Tyagi Sahab Dir. Gen. of IMD,

Dr L.S. Ralhore Head Agromet services, IMD

and fellow friends from Scientific community Media and all other present here.

It is a matter of proud that a very important seminar is being organized by M.C. Srinagar.  Srinagar is one of the oldest  heritage city we know that many important decisions and policies of a region are based on weather and climatic conditions.  Every one under the sky is affected by weather.  Every year hundreds of lives and property damaged due to disastrous weather.  Had they have advance information.  Such type of losses could have been minimized, yes such type of phenomena does not occur every day but whenever happens they leave behind nothing but victims in despair.  From this point of view today’s seminar is very important one for every one present here.

We know that the Met. Center Srinagar has been rendering valuable services to the people of J and K and I hope that they are rendering the services up to the expectation of the public of J and K.  The H.Q. of I.M.D. is making every efforts to provide proper infrastructure in the state under the Mod. Scheme IMD has planned to install one AWS in each district and two ARG in two Tehsils of each district.  To give better forecast IMD has planned to install one C band radar in Srinagar.

Today I take the liberty of utilizing this opportunity to draw the kind attention of Hon’ble Minister Sahab to some other important matters in which one is the revival of surface Met. Observatory at Gulmarg.  Being one of the oldest observatory which was established in 1897 by Britishers.  IMD is having archival Met. data of this observatory for more than 100 years but the observatory was demolished in 1990s Since Gulmarg is one of the important tourist place of the world and first signal of the western disturbance approaching to J and K is being observed at this place.  Therefore it my humble request to you sir kindly provide the suitable land in the periphery of bowel.

Another important matter is that in J and K divisions we have ten departmental observatories which are functional but we do not have any observatory in Leh and Ladhak region therefore it is also my humble request to you sir kindly provide us land in the region so that we can establish some surface observatories and at least one seismo observatory in the Leh and Ladhak region.  At the end I hope it is a good platform for interaction  between the forecasters and user agencies.

Thank you.