The NCRA building in the Pune University Campus

The National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA), Pune - a centre of the School of Natural Sciences of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) , Mumbai (earlier Bombay) was set up in 1989 on the beautiful green campus of the Pune University. TIFR, India's premier institution for research in Basic Sciences, was founded by late Dr. Homi Bhabha in 1945, with support from the Sir Dorabjee Tata Trust and the then Government of Bombay. The Institute is now funded by the Government of India, through the Department of Atomic Energy. Although NCRA continues to be very much a part of the School of Physics of TIFR, it has a separate Faculty and Board of Management headed by the Director of TIFR.

Research in radio astronomy at TIFR was begun in 1963 by Govind Swarup. Apart from building and operating the 32-element grating interferometer for radio studies of the Sun between 1965 and 1968 at Kalyan near Mumbai, the Radio Astronomy Group of TIFR took up the design and construction of the large cylindrical radio telescope at Ooty in the period 1965-1970. The Ooty Radio Telescope ( ORT ) operating in the frequency band about 327 Mhz became fully operational in 1970 and has contributed significantly to radio astronomical results in the fields of Sun and solar wind, Galactic radio sources and the interstellar medium, pulsars, radio galaxies, quasars and cosmology. It is a proud achievement that even after 25 years of active service, ORT still remains fully operational and a world-class instrument. A recent upgrade involving replacement of the front-end amplifiers has improved the sensitivity of the instrument by a factor of about 20. The Radio Astronomy Group had since been relocated either at Ooty or at the TIFR Centre in Bangalore. In mid-1980s, the Radio Astronomy Group of TIFR proposed to set up a much more powerful telescope operating in the metre-wavelength bands. After an extensive search for a suitable site for the Giant Metre-wave Radio Telescope( GMRT ), a site at Khodad near Narayangaon, about 80 km north of Pune was selected for the mammoth project. And the Radio Astronomy Group moved to Pune occupying offices in the land kindly provided by the Pune University and thus, NCRA came into existence in 1989. In 1994, the Council of Management of TIFR decided to bring all activities and facilities of the Radio Astronomy Group of TIFR at Ooty, Pune, Narayangaon and Khodad under the overall control of NCRA with its headquarters in Pune.

In the three decades since its formation, the radio astronomy group of TIFR has made many important contributions at the frontiers of knowledge and is today regarded internationally as a centre of excellence in this field.

The total NCRA staff strength is about one hundred and eighty-five in Pune and Khodad at present (apart from about fifty at Ooty). The raison d'etre of NCRA in Pune is of course the Giant Metre-wave Radio Telescope (GMRT). However its scientists are also involved in individual and collaborative research projects using other facilities in India and abroad. Putting together a thirty element interferometer is a rather complex engineering problem, and GMRT, is thus still very much in the hands of its engineers and those of its astronomers who can doff their scientific hats for engineering ones. The scientists and engineers are ably supported in their work by the administrative staff of NCRA.

The city of Pune is the second major city (after Mumbai) in the state of Maharashtra. It is located about 150 km south-east of Mumbai at an elevation of 500 m, and enjoys a moderate climate. The nearest international airport is at Mumbai, to which Pune is connected by rail, road, and air. The population of Pune is about 2 million. It has long been regarded as a centre of Marathi culture, and it is now also one of the fastest-growing industrial cities in India. The city and its University offer a stimulating environment for a research institute.

In addition to NCRA, the University campus hosts several other autonomous research centres - the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics ( IUCAA ), the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing ( C-DAC ), the Bio-Informatics Centre and the National Centre for Cell Sciences (BIOINFO) . The National Chemical Laboratory ( NCL ), an important institution of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, is located close to the University campus.