The Indian Subcontinent is a mosaic of various geological units, such as - ancient cratons, mobile belts, sedimentary basins, active rift, and collision zones, that formed over a geological time period from the Hadean to the current geological epoch. These geological units preserve signatures of sustained time-bound geological events and factors that affected the origin and evolution of this continent. These include, multiple breakup, subduction and collisional events related to Columbia, Rodinia and Gondwana supercontinent assembly periods, besides extraordinary movement of Indian plate and its interaction with four mantle plumes between 130 and 90 Ma.

Further, this subcontinent is surrounded by different types plate margins, such as Owen Fracture Zone (transform boundary) and Central Indian ridge (divergent boundary) in the west; Andaman - Arakan trenches (convergent boundary) in the East and Himalayan arc (convergent boundary) in the north. Among these plate margins, Andaman- Arakan trenches and Himalayan arc are considered among most active plate margins in the world, having witnessed great earthquakes in the past and are also proposed regions for possible larger magnitude earthquake(s) in future. Apart from earthquakes, this subcontinent is vulnerable from other geo-hazards, like land slide, flood, GLOF, rock slide etc.

CSIR-NGRI is conducting large scale multi-disciplinary experiments using both geological (e.g., geology, geochronology, geochemistry, petrology, structural, palaeomagnetism etc.) and geophysical (e.g., seismology, magneto telluric, gravity and magnetics, GPS, thermal, deep seismic sounding, etc.) methods to understand the geodynamics as well as geo-hazard associated with active plate margins of the Indian subcontinent.