DGRE: the DRDO lab in Manali that forecasts Himalayan avalanches

A government lab most drivers never hear of

Every winter, somewhere between Rohtang and Chang La, a decision gets made about whether a stretch of road is safe to plough or drive. A lot of that decision traces back to one small DRDO laboratory. The Defence Geoinformatics Research Establishment, known as DGRE, is headquartered in Chandigarh with a field centre in Manali. It was formed by merging the Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment, set up in 1969 to study Himalayan snow for the Army, with the Defence Terrain Research Laboratory, according to the government's own science and technology portal. DGRE's director is Dr Pramod K Satyawali, a DRDO scientist. Its stated mandate is to give the armed forces terrain intelligence, and avalanche forecasting for India's high passes is central to that work.

The scale of the job showed up in a Lok Sabha reply the government gave in December 2021. Minister of State for Defence Ajay Bhatt told Parliament that DGRE had 39 observatories working across Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Sikkim, with 10 more planned, feeding data back to Chandigarh so the lab could issue its Avalanche Warning Bulletin in near real time. The same reply said troops in the snow are equipped with avalanche victim detectors, trackers and reflectors, kit meant to find a buried soldier fast if a slope lets go, and that the bulletins help troops plan their movement and guard against an avalanche before it happens.

A calibration lab for the sensors that feed the bulletin

On January 28, 2024, DRDO's Director General Dr Shailendra V Gade inaugurated what the lab calls India's first snow avalanche sensor calibration facility, at Manali. It checks the electronic sensors inside DGRE's automatic weather stations spread across the Himalayan border region, the same stations whose readings become the daily bulletin. A drifted sensor gives a wrong temperature or snow depth reading, and a wrong reading can mean a wrong call on whether a slope or a pass is safe that day. The National Disaster Management Authority lists DGRE among its own key resources on avalanches, which is a fair measure of how much the country's disaster response leans on this one lab's data.

What a bulletin actually says

DGRE's bulletin for January 23 to 24, 2026 shows how specific this gets. It placed 13 zones in Jammu and Kashmir under alert, six of them red above 2,500 metres and seven orange. Five districts in Himachal Pradesh were flagged, four orange and one yellow. Uttarkashi, Chamoli, Rudraprayag and Pithoragarh in Uttarakhand got an orange alert, Bageshwar a yellow one above 2,800 metres, and Sikkim stayed green.

For a club or a convoy planning a winter drive into Spiti, Lahaul or Ladakh, that level of detail is the point. DGRE's bulletin is public, it updates through the season, and it says a lot more than "snow expected". Checking it before you leave home costs nothing and tells you more than any weather app will.

Sources

• Soldiers In High Altitude Areas Equipped With Avalanche Alert Gadgets
• DGRE Issued Avalanche Alert In Several States Across the Country Including Uttarakhand
• Defence Geoinformatics Research Establishment (DGRE)
• From Siachen to Manali: DRDO's Calibration Lab to Transform Border Region Safety
• National Disaster Management Authority