GRRID Corps

24/07/2026

Assam is under water again, with over 8 lakh lives upended by devastating floods. Right now, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds act as financial CPR during the peak of the surge—funding emergency rations, temporary shelters, and post-flood medical camps. This emergency aid is crucial to keep people alive today, but treating symptoms every monsoon won’t prevent tomorrow’s destruction.

If floods in Assam are a guaranteed annual reality, why are we still spending corporate capital on temporary fixes? What should CSR funds actually do to break this cycle for good, and how can corporate India shift from reactive charity to true climate and disaster resilience?

23/07/2026

It’s hot ☀️ ➔ You pray for rain 🌧️ ➔ It rains 🌧️ ➔ You expect relief 💨 ➔ You get… drenched in your own sticky sweat five minutes later! 🥵💦

If you’re in or around Kolkata right now, you know exact trap we’re talking about. The moment the rain stops, it doesn’t cool down—the whole city just turns into one big, heavy steam room!

So, what’s really going on here?

Think of the air like a giant sponge.

Your body cools itself down by letting sweat evaporate into the air. But if the air is already packed to the brim with water, your sweat has nowhere to go! It just sits on your skin.

So instead of getting cooled off by the rain, we get stuck wearing all that extra moisture—and that’s what gives us that heavy, suffocating, sticky feeling.

Stay hydrated, stick to the shadow side of the street, and hang in there! 🥤⚡

👇 Describe Kolkata’s weather right now using only 3 emojis!

Ours: 🌧️ 🌡️ 💦

20/07/2026

Recently, you might have noticed a shift in our outreach and dissemination materials. A significant portion of our content is now shared in vernacular languages—specifically Bengali and Hindi.

This isn’t just a trend, and it’s not just because open-source AI tools have made translation seamless.

It’s because the evidence demands it.

During our co-founder Repaul Kanji’s previous engagement, we saw a clear, quantifiable pattern: disaster and climate literacy improves dramatically when the medium is vernacular.

Let’s be honest—it’s a massive challenge.

Translating and interpreting complex scientific frameworks, acronyms, and technical jargon that are natively understood in English takes immense effort. If you translate literally, you lose the essence. If you don’t translate at all, you lose the audience.

But if we genuinely expect to build climate resilience and disaster literacy, we cannot expect frontline communities to meet us halfway in a language they don’t natively use.
Some of us have to do the heavy lifting. We need to take usable, life-saving knowledge and deliver it in the media and languages that people actually understand, appreciate, and trust.

RiskCommunication

15/07/2026

The recent downpours and sweltering heat in Kolkata have left us all "feeling" the shift in our environment. But behind these lived experiences lies a complex set of data that we must understand to build a resilient future.

In this explainer, we walk through how we can use AI to enhance Climate Literacy and move from being passive victims of weather extremes to proactive enablers of urban resilience.

https://youtu.be/Clg0T0FnTnk?si=PVs37mr4VluPe0iR

Climate action shouldn't be restricted to labs and policy rooms; it belongs in our neighborhoods. 🌍

P.S.: This is for the Bengali speakers in our network; language should not make science unreachable!

আপনার চারপাশের পরিবেশ কি আগের চেয়ে অনেক বেশি তপ্ত মনে হচ্ছে? (Does...

12/07/2026

From a viral reel to a high-tech reality: Building an AI-powered Road Flood Risk Dashboard

By fusing public data with an advanced ensemble of AI models (GBM, XGBoost, and ANN), we can predict which roads will flood before the clouds even burst. We analyzed everything from slope and curvature to impervious surface fractions to create a hyperlocal tool that identifies 6 distinct flood-risk clusters.

Ground-truthing with recent monsoon footage confirmed it: the dashboard is hitting the mark! 🎯

04/07/2026

While the results are interesting, it could also appear 'sour' to some!
But the fact remains, there are gaps which needs to be and can be bridged.

Share your comments, if this is of any interest to you!

India has ₹20,000+ crores flowing through Corporate Social Responsi...

30/06/2026

This week, France recorded its hottest day since measurements began in 1947, with temperatures reaching 44.3°C, while France’s health authority reported 1,000 additional deaths compared to previous months, a figure expected to rise. Across 45% of European cities, the danger wasn’t just the heat — indoor heat-humidity (WBGT) thresholds were broken, the exact compound stress that makes wet-bulb conditions so dangerous to the human body.

India knows this danger intimately. It isn’t temperature alone that kills — it’s temperature combined with humidity. As one analysis put it, when humidity climbs above 80% during a heatwave, an air mass of around 35°C can feel close to 50°C to the human body.

This is the crisis our new paper addresses — and the question that drove GRRID Corps’ work in the old city of Jodhpur: if modern infrastructure is struggling to cope, what can centuries-old architecture and indigenous knowledge teach us about surviving extreme heat?

Full paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07811-x