Poonam Arora is one of India’s timekeepers working at CSIR-National Physical Laboratory in Delhi. “We are the time keepers of India; we would like to be known as the time-authority of India,” she says.
Poonam was part of the team that built India’s first primary standard to measure time: the caesium fountain clock. India derives its timezone, Indian Standard Time (IST) from the ticking of this atomic clock. She is now also a part of the team that is making India’s first optical clock, a backup timescale for the country, other initiatives to synchronise and legalise time in India. In the podcast above podcast Poonam, talks about her work passionately and expresses the challenges she has faced as the only woman in most rooms at work.
You can flip through more pictures of Poonam below.
Colourful description of SI system of measurement for NPL visitors
