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In 1875, the Government of India established the India Meteorological Department, bringing all meteorological work in the country under a central authority. Mr. H. F. Blanford was appointed Meteorological Reporter to the Government of India. The first Director General of Observatories was Sir John Eliot, who was appointed in May 1889 at Calcutta headquarters. The headquarters of IMD were later shifted to Shimla, then to Poona (now Pune) and finally to New Delhi.

Sir Gilbert Thomas Walker CSI FRS was an English physicist and statistician of the 20th century, born on 14 June 1868, Rochdale, United Kingdom. Walker was an established applied mathematician at the University of Cambridge and gave up a Fellowship at Trinity to take up a position as assistant to the meteorological reporter in 1903. His interest moved to meteorology and he worked in India from 1903 to 1924 becoming Director-General of the Indian Observatories.

John Evershed (1864-1956) was an English astronomer who, in 1909, discovered the horizontal motion of gases outward from the centres of sunspots, a phenomenon sometimes called the Evershed effect. In 1906, Evershed became assistant director of the Kodaikanal and Madras observatories in India, later becoming director. Evershed retired in 1923, returning to England; in 1925, he built his own solar observatory at Ewhurst.

Smith was born in Keig in Aberdeenshire on 13 July 1854 the son of Jane Robertson and Rev William Pirrie Smith of the newly created Free Church of Scotland. He was educated locally and then went to first the University of Aberdeen then the University of Edinburgh to study mathematics and physics, graduating BSc in 1876. in 1899 he became the first Director of the Kodaikanal Solar Observatory.