V. K. Gaur, born on 11 July 1936 in Varanasi, a temple town in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, completed his master's degree at Banaras Hindu University with gold medal in 1955 and proceeded to the UK for his doctoral studies at Imperial College, London. After securing a PhD from the University of London in 1959, he did his post-doctoral work at Paris-Sorbonne University and started his career by joining National Physical Laboratory as a scientific officer in 1960. A year later, he returned to India and joined University of Roorkee as a reader where he spent 21 years, serving as a professor and the dean of research from 1978 till he moved to National Geophysical Research Institute as the director in 1983. After a service of 6 years, the Government of India appointed him as the secretary to the Department of Ocean Development of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, a post he held till 1992 when he joined CSIR Forth Paradigm as a Distinguished Professor. He served CMMACS till his superannuation in 1996, but continues to be associated with the institute as a CSIR Honorary Scientist. He also holds the position of a Distinguished Professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. In between, he held the directorship of Deccan Gold Mines from 2006 to 2011.
Legacy
One of the first contributions of Gaur to the science of geology came during his doctoral studies at Imperial College when he discovered the host rock effect in geo-electromagnetics, which had been unsuspected till then and this discovery assisted him in earning his PhD. His later studies covered the fields of geodesy, seismology and electromagnetics and his studies on the tectonics of Himalayas assisted in estimating the plate under-thrusts and understanding the micro-earthquakes in the region. He is credited with the discovery of the thick Deccan lithosphere which he accomplished using the seismic tomography experiments for the first time in India. He is reported to be the first scientist to use Global Positioning System Geodesy to measure the Indian plate velocity quantitatively in comparison to the Eurasian plate velocity and as well as the first to conduct an experiment to constrain global carbon fluxes in India and Central Asia through inversion of ultra-high precision atmospheric concentration data. His studies have been documented as several peer-reviewed articles, the article repository of the Indian Academy of Sciences has listed 61 of them. On the infrastructure development front, his contributions are reported in the implementation of Marine Satellite and Ocean Information Services and in the establishment of a CO2 laboratory at Indian Astronomical Observatory, Hanle. It was during his tenure as the professor, academic programs on signal analysis, inverse theory and computational geophysics were introduced at the University of Roorkee and the University Grants Commission of India subsequently extended the courses designed by him to other universities. His involvement is also known in the preparation of science texts for higher secondary studies of the Central Board of Secondary Education. He was one of the propagators of the Science to People programs and also sat in the councils of the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of.
