As a ground water hydrologist, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) professor Sekhar Muddu had not paid sufficient attention to measurements of evaporation and transpiration, two phenomena commonly described by a ponderous word called evapotranspiration. Muddu was attracted to this concept 10 years ago when he heard a talk by TN Narasimhan, then a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, US. 

Narasimhan, now deceased, was drawing the attention of hydrologists at the IISc to a curious fact. He thought that the ministry of water resources had no real data behind its assumptions of evapotranspiration, and that the numbers they used were an underestimate..................Read more

Source: The Economic Times