An underground experimental physics facility in Tamil Nadu will be ready within five years after the Cabinet gave its nod for setting up the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO).

“The Cabinet approved the INO on December 24. The budgetary approval is for Rs 1,500 crore to complete the observatory in five years,” Naba Kumar Mandal, a physicist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and spokesperson of the INO told Deccan Herald.



Though the project took off in 2005, the delay was largely due to the fact that the first choice site was cancelled at the last moment.



The INO will be located in the Bodi-West Hills region of Theni district. The underground facility will try to detect an elementary particle named neutrino. The project has received environmental clearance.



The department of atomic energy will now select a consultant for construction. “The construction can start anytime in 2015,” Shekhar Basu, director, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai, said at the ongoing Indian Science Congress, here. An Inter-institutional Centre for High Energy Physics, too, will be established at Madurai for operationalising the underground laboratory, for carrying out research on the detector and readying the manpower.



“The inter-university centre is currently functioning from a rented premise. We will have our building once the Tamil Nadu government completes the process,” Mandal said.

“This is India's largest project in basic science. There is tremendous potential for engaging science students across the country in basic research through this project,” said R K Sinha, secretary, department of atomic energy.



Though India carried out pioneering research in particle physics in the 1960s and 1970s using the underground laboratory at the Kolar gold mine, the studies were abandoned after the government decided to shut down the mine.



The Cabinet also approved the construction of a 50 kilo ton magnetised Iron Calorimeter detector – a scientific instrument to study the properties of neutrinos.



A consortium of 21 research institutes, universities and IITs are working on the instrument.