New Delhi: The Union Cabinet on Thursday gave its nod to a project to construct and set up a Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory- India (LIGO-India) at an estimated cost of Rs 2,600 crore which is likely to be completed by 2030.
Briefing reporters, Union minister Jitendra Singh said it would come up in Hingoli, Maharashtra.
LIGO-India will be an advanced gravitational-wave observatory to be located in India as part of a worldwide network.
It is envisaged as a collaborative project between a consortium of Indian research institutions and the LIGO Laboratory in USA, along with its international partners.
LIGO-India had received the government’s in-principle approval in February 2016. Since then, the project reached several milestones towards selecting and acquiring a site and building the observatory.
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The United States will provide key components for the lab worth USD 80 million, which amounts to Rs 560 crore.
The LIGO-India project will be built by the Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Science and Technology, with a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the National Science Foundation, the US, along with several national and international research and academic institutions.
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