China is looking up to this Indian to save itself from natural disasters

NEW DELHI: A Chinese government department is looking to hire an Indian expert, the first for such a department in China. China's Earthquake Administration (CEA) is considering India-born geophysicist Paramesh Banerjee for the top post at its Institute of Geophysics. Banerjee is the only non-Chinese among the four candidates. At present, he is technical director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore (EOS) at Nanyang Technical University (NTU).Earthquakes are a major problem for China. The worst in the recent times was in decade ago that killed 70,000 people in the Sichuan province.Banerjee will be the first Indian to head a Chinese scientific institution though many Indians scientists already work at institutions affiliated to the Chinese government.Banerjee, who was elected president of the Asian Seismological Commission in 2017, had outlined a "practical approach towards safeguarding Asian society from earthquake-related hazards" at the commission's general assembly meeting held last year at Chengdu in China.An alumnus of the Indian School of Mines in Dhanbad, Banerjee worked at the University of California, Berkeley, in the US and at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in Dehradun before joining Singapore's NTU in 2009. Banerjee, who has a commercial pilot license, flew over Nepal after the 2015 earthquake to construct a 3-D digital terrain map of the Himalayan faults.“He (Banerjee) has a doctoral degree in applied geophysics and leads a team of scientists and engineers who are responsible for design, installation, maintenance and data processing for all types of geophysical and geochemical field instrumentation networks, monitoring volcanoes and tectonically active regions in South and Southeast Asia,” said the state-controlled China Daily newspaper. “China has the power, willingness and mindset to help others, and that’s why I am here,” Banerjee told the newspaper. "I want to make this institute an internationally prominent one in geophysics and a regional leader if I become the next head.”Disaster research and mitigation efforts cannot be confined to national boundaries, Banerjee told reporters after his interview a week ago. He said the seismic science community was not fully keeping up with economic development, and as the world's second-largest economy, China should not have so many people dying from earthquakes.

from The Economic Times https://ift.tt/2J7IDaX