GROW-N

  “We Make Everything Else Possible” – A Bold Reimagining of Civil Engineering On 26 th June 2025, the GROW-N Monthly Talk Series hosted a speaker who did far more than deliver a lecture—he sparked a movement.  Prof. Rajagopalan Balaji, a globally respected faculty member from the University of Colorado Boulder, spoke about the past, present and future of civil engineering. His talk sparked an important conversation, offering students valuable insights into building a meaningful career in the civil engineering industry. Prof. Balaji began candidly: he hadn’t even wanted to be a civil engineer. Like many, he ended up in the field due to rank and options. But decades later, with an illustrious international career, he confidently declared: “If I had to start all over again, I wouldn’t choose anything but civil engineering.” The surprising part? His journey wasn’t just about technical skills—it was about realizing that infrastructure is the backbone of our society, driv...

How should literature survey be done? Literature survey is a very important part of research. However, students are generally not told how to do it systematically. In India, students are often expected to present their research as if they started their actual work only after completing the literature survey. New researchers typically ask me for papers to start with. If I give them a couple of papers, they will take a couple of weeks to read them line by line, then come back to explain what they understood and ask me to explain the parts they did not. I call this passive research -- the course of your research is defined by what you read. Instead, I promote active research. Start with a question. Check the literature for answers. What is the difference? You don’t need to read and understand an entire paper you come across. You are only checking whether an answer already exists or not. It is much more efficient. An example when the research objective is improving streamflow prediction: P...

The Pleasure of Being an Academic:  A Journey with Prof. B.S. Murty                                                                                                                                                 - Amit Kantode In a world increasingly chasing immediate rewards and fast success, listening to Professor B.S. Murty talk about his academic journey feels like a refreshing walk through a forest of patience, passion, and purpose. Speaking at the inaugural event of GROW-N, a collaborative initiative to foster academic interaction, Prof. Murty's heartf...

In this blog article, we will underline the need for a new networking platform for people working in areas related to remote sensing, ocean engineering, and water resources engineering, and highlight how GROW-N aims to address this need. Why We Need an Effective Networking Platform in India Science is inherently a social activity. People learn from each other, ensuring the passage of knowledge from one generation to the next. While reading books and research papers is considered as the primary mode of learning, the importance of personal interaction should not be ignored at all. It is often far easier to learn from someone through personal interaction than by reading journal articles written by the person. That is why we attend conferences, sometimes travelling thousands of miles. The importance of shared learning has been realized in recent years, prompting funding agencies to encourage multi-institutional research projects. In essence, everyone in a scientific community is part of t...

by  Prof.  Basudev Biswal  Pursuing PhD is challenging for many reasons, the main one being the confusion surrounding it, partly created by memes and misinformation about PhD struggles on the internet. Many students start PhD with the notion that it’s simply a continuation of their academic journey. In reality, it requires a different level of intellectual rigor. In a blog post I wrote in 2019, I provided a few suggestions for prospective PhD students. In this post, I highlight the importance of being independent during PhD. Broadly, there are two types of PhDs: Type 1 PhD: The adviser hands over a problem statement (research proposal). The student conducts literature reviews to figure out the steps for execution. The student and adviser work together to do the analysis, discuss the results, and frame the story to publish the findings. Type 2 PhD: The student conducts literature reviews and comes up with a problem statement. The adviser helps the student polish the pro...

originally published in Sept 24th, 2020 on  GROW's website . For a country like India whose economy is primarily dependent on agriculture and experiencing frequent drought episodes, is it enough to assess those drought conditions based on precipitation alone? That being the case, we used Multivariate Standardized Drought Index to analyze the historical drought conditions caused by simultaneous deficits in precipitation and soil moisture for 30 meteorological sub-divisions in India. Further, we present a country-wide multivariate drought atlas for India based on the severity-duration-frequency relationships.   The 2015 drought event in India had affected multiple sectors including reservoir levels, crop yields, and well-being of people. This drought event was deficient in both precipitation and soil moisture. Therefore, we used the developed multivariate drought atlas to analyze the rarity, spatial extent, and the historical context of the impactful 201...