A ‘Boat Lab’ to study Brahmaputra:

A ‘Boat Lab’ to study Brahmaputra:

Context

• The Department of Biotechnology will commission a two-tiered barge that will roughly be the size of two large conference rooms and host scientists and a full-fledged lab that will allow those on board to collect samples from various stretches of the river, perform tests on water quality and biodiversity of the wider ecosystem.

The Brahmaputra Biodiversity Biology Boat (B4)

• The proposed vessel, now only known as the Brahmaputra Biodiversity Biology Boat (B4), will be linked to smaller boats and research labs.

• The first experiments will likely begin this December and will have the boat a re-purposed one trawl Pasighat, Dibrigarh, Neemati, Tejpur and Guwahati in Assam and managed by the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.
• The “B4” will also have a teaching laboratory for school and college children.
• There would also be ‘mobile labs’ that would run along the tributaries of the Brahmaputra to feed in data to the B4.
• A boat of this nature would be one of its kind in the world though there were a few precedents in China and mobile laboratories that studied the Amazon river.