The Need for a National Archaeological Database

Abstract

India's economic development is evident in its industrial growth, extensive transportation network, and rapidly expanding cities, towns and villages. While this growth has numerous positive aspects, it also has the potential to cause irrevocable damage (directly or indirectly) to rich archaeological heritage of the country. The present study makes three contributions. First, it examines several archaeological sites where economic developmental activities have caused significant damage. Second, it demonstrates how the risk of further damage can be minimized using geospatial solutions to protect and manage such sites. Third, it conceptualizes a framework for incorporating spatial and non-spatial knowledge of archaeological sites into a National Archaeological Database. We propose that this national archive should be made publicly accessible under the Digital India programme, where it can assist decision makers (development authorities, state departments, etc.) and help citizens plan for future economic growth while preserving the fragile remnants of our past.

A Post-correlation Beamformer for Time-domain Studies of Pulsars and Transients

“…The high discovery rate of the GMRT High Resolution Southern Sky (GHRSS 12 ; Bhattacharyya et al (2016); Bhattacharyya (2017)) as well as the Fermi-directed survey (Bhatacharyya et al 2013) demonstrate the capabilities of the GMRT for low frequency pulsar searches. The recent upgrade of the GMRT allowing much larger instantaneous bandwidths (uGMRT; Gupta et al (2017)) brings a significant increase in its theoretical survey sensitivity for pulsars and FRBs at low and mid radio frequencies. With the uGMRT, phase-2 of the GHRSS survey (Roy 2018) is expected to achieve a sensitivity better than all existing and ongoing off-galactic plane surveys.…”

National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS)

“…One of Tipu Sultan's armories lay on the planned path of doubling the Bengaluru-Mysuru railway line at Srirangapatna, but the project proceeded and then stalled while a decision on the fate of this structure was debated. In addition to the economic impact caused by this delay, the eventual decision to preserve the structure resulted in significant additional cost to move the armory (Gupta et al, 2017b).…”

“…It has been planned to create a national geospatial database of cultural heritage landscapes through accurate geospatial analysis, characterization and documentation (Gupta et al, 2017b). Such information can be easily integrated with auxiliary cultural information specific to locations available from ground survey reports.…”

Prospects of detecting fast radio bursts using Indian radio telescopes

“…Each dish has five prime fo- cus feeds, only one of which is available at a given time, having five discrete operational frequencies centered at 150 MHz, 235 MHz, 325 MHz, 610 MHz and 1280 MHz with a maximum backend instantaneous frequency bandwidth of 32 MHz. Currently the GMRT is going through an upgradation (Gupta et al, 2017), to provide significantly large instantaneous bandwidths with four operational frequencies, viz. Band 2 at 185 MHz with a bandwidth of 130 MHz, Band 3 at 375 MHz with a bandwidth of 250 MHz, Band 4 at 700 MHz with a bandwidth of 300 MHz and Band 5 at 1250 MHz with a bandwidth of 400 MHz.…”