It is an agency of the Ministry of Earth Sciences of the government of India. It was formed in 1875 and Henry Francis Blanford was appointed the first Meteorological Reporter of IMD. In May 1889, Sir John Eliot was appointed as the first Director General of Observatories in the erstwhile Capital, Calcutta. The IMD headquarters were later shifted to Shimla in 1905, then to Pune in 1928 and finally to New Delhi in 1944.
It is the principal agency responsible for meteorological observations, weather forecasting and seismology. It has the distribution of warnings for tropical cyclones in the Northern Indian Ocean region, including the Malacca Straits, the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.
