Morning alarm
When India was hit by the tsunami, it was in uncharted territory. The last one had occurred in 1945 and even general knowledge, leave aside scientific research, was hard to come by. The scientific establishment reacted fast to set in place warning systems.
The government drew up a plan last year that envisaged putting in place an indigenous tsunami warning system by September 2007. A prerequisite to doing this was upgrading its nearly moribund seismic stations so that they could transmit seismic data to a central location with the briefest of time-lags. Then would come deep-ocean sensors which detect any activity on the ocean bed. The third element in the trinity would be gauges that would record tides along the coast to monitor surface manifestations of subterranean activity.
The progress hasn't been bad. The seismic monitoring time-lag is down from 40 to 15 minutes. The currently analog tide gauges are being replaced with digital versions which can transfer data instantaneously to a central location through satellites