Dr. Richa Babbar
Richa Babbar is working as an Associate Professor at Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology, Patiala. She was appointed to be a part of Civil Engineering faculty in the year 2010. Before joining Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology, she was working with Jaypee University of Information and Technology, Waknaghat (Himachal Pradesh) in the capacity of Assistant Professor for four years. She earned her Doctorate degree from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India in the year 2008, and her graduate degree is in Civil Engineering. Her Ph.D work involved intensive fieldwork, monitoring and modeling of water quality for its management. Other than teaching to undergraduate and postgraduate students, she holds various Institute/ departmental level responsibilities. As a UG coordinator, she is handling the issues related to UG curriculum, facilitating its design and implementation. She served as Warden of a girl’s hostel having strength of around 270 students for a period of 3 years. The responsibility called for managing the needs of in house girl students.
Water quality modeling, Watershed management, Decision support Systems, Climate change study
Two research projects have ben submitted to two different funding agencies within India, and are presently under review.
| Details | From | To |
|---|---|---|
| Indian Society of Hydraulics | 2001 | Life member |
| Environmental & Water Resource Institute (EWRI) | 2013 | 2014 |
| International Water Association (Base Member) | 2009 | 2010 |
Kumar Arunish, Babbar Richa and Ratha Dwarikanath (2017). Assessment of runoff potential of Tehri sub-watersheds based on geomorphology and runoff index, Disaster Advances, Vol (10), no. 9, 9-17.
Richa Babbar and Sakshi Babbar (2017). Predicting river water quality index using data mining techniques, Environmental Earth Sciences, 76:504, DOI 10.1007/s12665-017-6845-9.
Richa Babbar, Malik Yousuf Hussain Ali (2017). A multivariate statistical approach to evaluate the impact of tributaries on water quality of a tropical river, Environmental Conservation, Clean Water, Air & Soil (CleanWAS), IWA Publishing.
Richa Babbar (2014). Pollution Risk Assessment based on QUAL2E-UNCAS simulations of a Tropical River in Northern India, 186, 6771-6787.
Richa Babbar (2013). A Bayesian model to evaluate water quality of polluted river in Northern India, 35Th IAHR World Congress, Chengdu, China September 8-13, 2013.
Richa Babbar and Himanshu Joshi (2010). Mixed integer programming for pollution control of Indian Tropical River: a case study, Journal of Transdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Vol (9), no.2.
Richa Babbar, Rashmi Vikal and Aruna Thube (2010). An Electrical Analogy for flow augmentation in tropical rivers, 9th International Conference on Environment and Electrical Engineering, Prague, Czec Republic, May 16-19, 2010
Richa Babbar, D.S. Arya and Himanshu Joshi (2009). A Proposed Decision Support System for River Water Quality Management. Journal of Decision Systems, Vol. 18, no. 4, 411-427
Richa Babbar and Himanshu Joshi (2009). Integrating socio-economic aspects for decision support: Underlying theories and principles, 33 rd IAHR World Congress, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Aug 9-14.
Richa Babbar and Himanshu Joshi (2008). Empirical Validation of Field Estimated Dispersion Coefficient for a Tropical River, Asian Journal of Water, Environment and Pollution, 5(3), 73-78.
| Award | Date |
|---|---|
| Netherlands Fellowship Programme | 2008 |
| MHRD scholarship | 2003 |
| MHRD - GATE scholarship | 1994 |
Richa Babbar's research interests include water quality modeling for evaluating assimilative capacity of rivers, watershed (agricultural) management for assessing simulating runoff driven sediment erosion and non-point pollution, and studying the causal dynamics of water quality parameters for inferring overall quality of tropical rivers. Recently, it has been felt that simulating the river for its present pollutions status and management thereof is inadequate until or unless the impact of climate change on the hydrology of watershed is also taken into consideration. The primary reason for this being that change in climate is bound to affect two significant parameters of river: flow and quality. This impact will be visible in the form of effect of increasing river water temperatures on kinetics of contaminants present in waters, changes in river flows hence affecting the flushing of non-point pollutants or dilution of point sources pollutants, the role of intense rainfall events on estimating the magnitude of nutrient and sediment loading of natural drains and urban drainage systems, and many more. Hence, Richa Babbar is currently interested to study change in hydrology of watershed due to climate change effect. Learning to perform climate change modeling for areas that are already under water stress, and hence require managerial interventions before the disaster strikes is her recent interest.
