NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF OCEANOGRAPHY
The Vice President of India, Venkaiah Naidu, while interacting with Scientists of National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), in Dona Paula, Goa has called for fully tapping the enormous potential of the Blue Economy for the country to achieve higher economic growth.
About:
- Parent Body: The National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) is one of the 37 constituent laboratories of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi.
- Location: NIO is headquartered at Dona Paula, Goa, and has regional centres at Kochi, Mumbai and Visakhapatnam.
- History: NIO was established in 1966 following the International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE) in the 1960s.
- Functions:
- It is a multi-disciplinary oceanographic research institute. The major research areas include the four traditional branches of oceanography – biological, chemical, geological/geophysical, and physical – as well as ocean engineering, marine instrumentation and marine archaeology.
- It also operates two research vessels RV Sindhu Sankalp (56 m) and RV Sindhu Sadhana (80 m) that are equipped for multidisciplinary oceanographic observations.
- CSIR-NIO serves as an advanced centre of education in ocean sciences. It has a School of Oceanography under the Academy of Scientific & Innovative Research (AcSIR).
- It is a multi-disciplinary oceanographic research institute. The major research areas include the four traditional branches of oceanography – biological, chemical, geological/geophysical, and physical – as well as ocean engineering, marine instrumentation and marine archaeology.
The institute with headquarters in Goa has three regional centres, one each at Mumbai, Kochi and Visakhapatnam. It manages the Ocean Research Vessel Sagar Kanya (owned by the Department of Ocean Development, Government of India). The institute carries out research in different oceanographic aspects. Over the years it has grown to be the largest ocean research organization in the Indian Ocean Region. The experience and expertise of the institute is extensively utilized by both public and private sector organizations. The institute provides consultancy and contract service on environmental impact assessments, harbour and port development, location of feasible submarine pipelines routes, seabed surveys, design and development of instruments and several other aspects. Research in open coastal waters remains the core of the institute’s activities, and following the restructuring operation, the research programmes were reformulated along the project lines. The major areas of research are : sustainable use of coastal zone, coastal dynamics, land-ocean interaction, role of the Indian Ocean in monsoon and climate variability, biodiversity and biomedical potential, quaternary paleoclimate, biogeochemical processes, offshore mineral resources, evolution of continental margins, development of marine instruments, deterioration of materials in marine environments, archaeological exploration, engineering parameters for marine structures, biotechnology for industrial and aquaculture applications, tropical dynamics.
The Bioinformatics Centre at the National Institute of Oceanography was established in 1990 under Biotechnology Information System of DBT, as one of the Distributed Information Sub-Centres. It specializes in the field of Marine Biotechnology. The main function of the centre is to act as a member of BTIS Network for providing information to the interested users on topics pertaining to the relevant areas of Marine Biotechnology. The functions of the centre include, among others, acquisition, creation and development of softwares and databases needed by the users.
