CSIR centre to research bioresources

 India is all set to have its first non-military research centre in a cold desert to look for commercially beneficial plants and microbes that thrive in those harsh conditions.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) will soon open up its Centre for High Altitude Biology in Ribling, a tiny locality in the cold and arid Spiti valley of Himachal Pradesh. The Rs 25-crore institute might be inaugurated formally in the next year after works on few laboratories were completed, sources told Deccan Herald.

Once functional, this will be India’s second cold desert research centre, the first one being the Defence Institute of High Altitude Research (DIHAR) in Leh. While DIHAR comes under the defence ministry and has its own research mandate, the CSIR institute will be fully civilian and broad-based.

“The new centre will focus on adaptation biology and bioprospection research on plants, microbes, insects, animals and ecosystems in the face of climate change. It will be in consonance with the national mission for sustaining the Himalayan ecosystem,” said a CSIR official.

Instead of being a fully independent centre, the Spiti unit will initially come under the administrative control of the Institute for Himalayan Bioresources Technology (IHBT), Palampur.

Several laboratories of the centre are being set up using prefabricated structures. Presently, the unit is functioning from a temporary office at Tandi and a garden store has been opened up at the district headquarters at Keylong. “At the moment, there are five researchers, but when the centre would be ready, we plan to post at least 20 scientists there,” he said.

In an unique transaction, the council also purchased water-use rights from the local community, which owns water in that area. The CSIR's governing council headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, too, approved the new centre in its last meeting in October.