Anna Mani (1918-2001)

Highly regarded in scientific circles and admired as a woman of great character, Anna was one of India's early feminists.

Anna Mani, the distinguished Indian meteorologist, was the former Deputy Director General of the Indian Meteorological Department. She made significant contributions in the field of meteorological instrumentation and pioneered research in the areas of solar radiation, ozone and wind energy measurements.

Born in 1918 in Travancore, she was the seventh of eight children of a prosperous engineer. She graduated in 1939 from the Presidency College in Madras with a B Sc honours degree in physics and chemistry and went on to do research on the optical properties of ruby and diamond, under the Nobel Prize winner C. V. Raman. The results were published in five scientific papers. Anna Mani was then awarded a government scholarship to study meteorological instruments in Britain where she spent the next two years, mainly in the Meteorological Office at Harrow. On returning to India in 1948 she started her IMD career in the Instruments Division in Pune. By 1953, she had been promoted to be head of the division with 121 men working for her – an unusual situation in India at that time.

After she retired from the Indian Meteorological Service in 1976, she continued to work at the Raman Institute in Bangalore as long as she possibly could. For the next 20 years she devoted herself to assessing the energy potential of wind and solar radiation in India. This involved the design of new instruments, establishing and operating many new wind monitoring stations, and the assembly and publication in the most suitable form of wind and radiation data.

Over the years, Anna Mani had many associations with the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics (IAMAP).

Anna Mani was keenly interested in research on atmospheric ozone. It was for her work in this field, extending over more than 30 years, that in 1987 she was awarded the K. R. Ramanathan Medal by the Indian National Science Academy, of which she herself was a Fellow. Her Medal Lecture is an excellent review of the then state of knowledge about atmospheric ozone.

She is admired for her scientific achievements internationally and loved for her warmth and laughter; but perhaps her most heroic achievement has been her battle in the last few years against Parkinson's and a series of strokes. Anna died on 16th August 2001.

An Essay on Anna Mani:
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2001/10/14/stories/1314078b.htm