James Palladio Basevi (23 February 1832 – 17 July 1871) was a British army engineer who conducted one of the first gravimetric surveys in India using a pendulum.
Educated at Rugby and Cheltenham College, he showed talent in mathematics, winning a Pollock Medal before joining the East India Company as an army engineer.
In 1864 he began to conduct pendulum surveys using instruments from the Royal Society that had belonged to General Edward Sabine.
He suffered from pains in the chest and he was given steam to inhale and on the morning of 17th he got up but felt very ill, dressed up, lay down and died in his bed with blood oozing from his nostrils, mouth, ears, and eyes.
He counted the number of oscillations of the standardized pendulum in a mean solar day and computations were made based on this.