Pragnaditya Malakar

Dr. Pragnaditya Malakar

Assistant Professor

Earth and Environmental Sciences

pmalakar@iiserbpr.ac.in

Academic Background

PhD (Hydrogeology), Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India
MSc (Geology), Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India
BSc (Geological Sciences), Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Professional Experience

Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, IISER Berhampur, Odisha, India (2025 - Present)
Assistant Professor, Department of Geological Sciences, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India (2022 - 2025)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, University of Alabama, USA (2021 - 2022)

Research Interests

Impact of climate variability/change and human influence on groundwater
Groundwater recharge and storage quantification; and process understanding
Machine learning and deep learning-based applications for predicting groundwater
Groundwater drought characteristics

About me

I am a hydrogeologist, working at the intersection of groundwater and data science. The overreaching goal of my research is to harness Insitu, big hydrological, and satellite based information to understand the role of meteorological and anthropogenic influences and processes on groundwater dynamics. By extension, use this understanding to improve the current generation of machine learning and deep learning-based groundwater models to provide rational insights for future water and food security and sustainability.

Biography

Before joining IISER Berhampur, Dr. Malakar served as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geological Sciences, Jadavpur University, for three years (2022–2025), where he taught Hydrogeology, Remote Sensing & GIS, and Environmental Geology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Prior to his academic career, Dr. Malakar worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Alabama, USA (2021–2022), where he integrated big hydrological datasets to understand groundwater recharge and drought susceptibility in the United States.

Dr. Malakar’s academic journey began with a B.Sc. from the Department of Geological Sciences at Jadavpur University. He then pursued his M.Sc. from the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Dr. Malakar earned his Ph.D. in Hydrogeology from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 2021. His doctoral research focused on the natural and human-induced impact on groundwater resources and their implications for crop yield and drinking water supply. He developed novel data-driven models to asses and forecast groundwater levels, understand recharge/storage mechanisms, and identify influences on groundwater depletion. His Ph.D. research was supervised by Prof. Abhijit Mukherjee (Department of Geology And Geophysics, IITKGP) and Prof. Sudeshna Sarkar (Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT KGP).

Dr. Malakar has led and participated in multiple research projects funded by national and international agencies. He is currently the Principal Investigator of an ANRF-DST-funded project that investigates the influence of climate variability/change and human activities on depth-dependent groundwater recharge in semi-arid regions of India. This project employs a combination of chemical, physical, and AI-based modeling techniques to improve groundwater sustainability assessments.

Research Projects

My sanctioned project (role: PI, ~INR 34.6 lakhs for three years, from ANRF-DST) aims to assess the impact of climate variability/change and human intervention on depth-dependent groundwater recharge using chemical, physical, and AI-based modeling.

Key Publications

Malakar, P*., Anshuman, A., Kumar, M., Boumis, G., Clement, T. P., Tashie, A., ... & Rathore, L. (2025). An in-situ daily dataset for benchmarking temporal variability of groundwater recharge. Earth System Science Data (accepted)
Malakar, P.*, Bhanja, S.N., Dash, A.A., Saha, D., Ray, R.K., Sarkar, S., Zahid, A. and Mukherjee, A. (2022): Delineating Variabilities of Groundwater Level Prediction Across the Agriculturally Intensive Transboundary Aquifers of South Asia. ACS ES&T Water, 3(6), 1547-1560.
Malakar, P.*, Mukherjee, A., Bhanja, S. N., Ganguly, A. R., Ray, R.K., Zahid, A., Sarkar, S., Saha, D., Chattopadhyay, S. (2021): Three decades of depth-dependent groundwater response to climate variability and human regime in the transboundary Indus-Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna mega river basin aquifers. Advances in Water Resources, 149, 103856.
Malakar, P.*, Mukherjee, A., Bhanja, S. N., Sarkar, S., Saha, D., & Ray, R. K. (2021): Deep Learning-Based Forecasting of Groundwater Level Trends in India: Implications for Crop Production and Drinking Water Supply. ACS ES&T Engineering, 1, 965–977.
Malakar, P., Mukherjee, A., Bhanja, S. N., Ray, R. K., Sarkar, S., & Zahid, A. (2021): Machine-learning-based regional-scale groundwater level prediction using GRACE. Hydrogeology Journal, 29, 1027–1042.
Malakar, P*., Mukherjee, A., Bhanja, S. N., Saha, D., Ray, R. K., Sarkar, S., & Zahid, A. (2020): Importance of spatial and depth-dependent drivers in groundwater level modeling through machine learning. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions, 1-22.
Bhanja, S. N., Malakar, P., Mukherjee, A., Rodell, M., Mitra, P., & Sarkar, S. (2019): Using Satellite‐Based Vegetation Cover as Indicator of Groundwater Storage in Natural Vegetation Areas. Geophysical Research Letters, 46(14), 8082-8092.
Aind, D. A., Malakar, P., Sarkar, S., & Mukherjee, A. (2022). Controls on Groundwater Fluoride Contamination in Eastern Parts of India: Insights from Unsaturated Zone Fluoride Profiles and AI-Based Modeling. Water, 14(20), 3220.
Deb, P., Malakar, P., Bora, P. K., & Dubey, S. K. (2024). Univariate versus multivariate flood frequency analysis in tropical region: Employing two classes of hydrological models. CLEAN–Soil, Air, Water, 2300351.
Das, K., Mukherjee, A., Malakar, P., Das, P., Dey, U. (2021): Impact of global-scale hydroclimatic changes on drinking water quality variability and processes of multi-depth aquifers of the Ganges river delta front of Sundarbans. Science of the Total Environment, 798.
Bhanja, S. N., Mukherjee, A., Rangarajan, R., Scanlon, B. R., Malakar, P., & Verma, S. (2019): Long-term groundwater recharge rates across India by in situ measurements. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences. 23(2), 711-722.
Mukherjee, A., Bhanja, S. N., Rodell, M., Wada, Y., Malakar, P., Saha, D., & MacDonald, A. M. (2023). Contesting with the Ganges Water Machine in South Asia: Theory versus Reality. ACS ES&T Water, 3(3), 626-628.
Duttagupta, S., Bhattacharya, A., Mukherjee, A., Chattopadhyay, S., Bhanja, S. N., Sarkar, S., Malakar, P., & Bhattacharya, J. (2019): Groundwater faecal pollution observation in parts of Indo-Ganges–Brahmaputra river basin from in-situ measurements and satellite-based observations. Journal of Earth System Science, 128(3), 44.

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