MD

Manas Das

Government of West Bengal, Indian Institute of Technology Dhanbad, Vidyasagar University

ORCID iD 0000-0002-6912-6715
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About

Manas Das works specifically on natural hazards, on the distance between a map of where risk is predicted and a measurement of where it actually falls, the gap that has to be closed before a map can warn anyone.

He joined the Remote Sensing and GIS program at Vidyasagar University in Midnapore, where his M.Sc. dissertation built a GIS-based multi-criteria decision framework for landslide susceptibility mapping in the Sikkim Himalaya. He has been working on that landscape ever since.

Between the M.Sc. and the M.Tech, there were two and a half years that shaped how he works. As a GIS Analyst with the Office of the Assistant Director of Agriculture (Soil Conservation) in Midnapore, under the Government of West Bengal, he worked on new-generation watershed development projects under PMKSY-WDC 2.0. The maps he produced there were not made for journals. They went to administrators to decide where to allocate money and effort, and that changed their sense of what a model is for. An analysis nobody can act on is a finished piece of work only in the narrowest sense.

The same period produced a second body of research, on the human side of spatial analysis. Working with Bikash Dutta and colleagues in Midnapore, he published on primary healthcare site selection and on spatial accessibility to health facilities during health shocks, and co-authored the book Using GIS to Identify Opportunities for Improved Health in Urban Slums: The Applied Case of Midnapore, India, published by Springer Nature in 2025 in the Global Perspectives on Health Geography series. Questions of inequality, hygiene, and healthcare access in slum neighborhoods remain active in his work.

In 2024, he qualified for GATE in Geomatics Engineering and joined IIT (ISM) Dhanbad for an M.Tech in Geomatics, working in the Rock Slope Engineering Lab under Dr. Radhakanta Koner. His thesis, Landslide Dynamics in the Sikkim Himalaya: A Spatio-Temporal Assessment, returned to the terrain of his M.Sc. with a different toolkit. Where the earlier work ranked hazards using expert-weighted criteria, the newer work interrogates that ranking by comparing the analytic hierarchy process, frequency ratio, and logistic regression models against one another; benchmarking classical, ensemble, and subspace-based algorithms; and validating the resulting susceptibility surfaces against PSInSAR displacement time series derived from Sentinel-1. That last step is the one that matters most to him. A susceptibility map is a static claim about a landscape that is not static, and InSAR offers a way to ask whether the claim survives contact with measured ground movement.

The question has since widened beyond Sikkim - to the NH-44 corridor in the Western Himalaya, to debris flow hazard modeling, and to the environmental aftermath of coal mining in the Jharia Coalfield, where he works on land-use change, land surface temperature, and ecological restoration.

His research interests include natural hazards and multi-hazard risk assessment, numerical modeling, SAR and InSAR time-series analysis, geospatial data modeling, and early warning systems. He works primarily in Python and Google Earth Engine, as well as SNAP, MintPy, SARPROZ, ArcGIS, and QGIS.

Alongside the research, he teaches. Through GeoAcademy, a learning platform for GATE Geomatics Engineering and CUET Geography and Geoinformatics aspirants, he teaches surveying, GNSS, remote sensing, GIS, and digital image processing - the same syllabus he sat in 2024. Students he has taught have gone on to M.Tech and Ph.D. programs at IIT (ISM) Dhanbad, IIT Jodhpur, and IIEST Shibpur. He treats the teaching as continuous with the research rather than separate from it: both are attempts to make technical geospatial work legible to the people who have to use it.

He serves as a reviewer for Scientific Reports, GeoJournal, Discover Environment, Discover Public Health, and many more.

Employment

  • Government of West Bengal GIS Analyst
    2021 - 2024

Education

  • Indian Institute of Technology Dhanbad MTech
    2024 - 2026
  • Vidyasagar University MSc
    2018 - 2020

Projects & Funding

Projects & funding information is unavailable.

Publications (19)