The spatial distribution of earthquakes in India is more clustered at the plate boundary and sparse within the interior. The occurrence of these earthquakes is not well explained by any numerical model. At any site, engineers are interested to know the hazard due to earthquakes. For this purpose, the identification of active faults is an important problem in seismic hazard analysis. This paper focuses on developing a new mechanistic approach to model Indian plate to assess the activity of faults in India. The variations in earth's crustal geographical features are taken care in modelling by assigning heterogeneous elastic material properties to the broad geological provinces in India. These properties are obtained by comparing the plate deformations with the present day GPS measurements through model inversion. The tectonic faults are modelled using the well-established 'eXtended finite element method (X-FEM)'. The obtained results are found to compare well with the recorded seismicity data and GPS measurements.

Keywords: XFEM, Hazard, Optimization, GPS measurements, Active faults, Recurrence relation.