The GRAPES-3 is an extensive air shower (EAS) experiment, set up at Ooty in South India with the collaborative efforts of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, India and Osaka City University, Japan. It contains a dense array of 400 scintillation detectors of 1 m2 area each and with 8 m inter-spacing, designed to measure energy spectrum of primary cosmic rays (PCRs) over 1013 - 1016 eV, and a large area (560 m2) tracking muon telescope, designed to measure the muon content in EAS to obtain PCRs composition. The muon telescope is also designed to trigger single muons, providing sensitive directional measurements of galactic cosmic ray variation, caused by various solar phenomena. In this talk, after giving an overview of the GRAPES-3 experiment, I will present some interesting measurements obtained on solar diurnal anisotropy which demonstrates the unique potential of this muon telescope. Then, I will discuss how this muon telescope can be used as an effective tool for space weather warnings, providing a few examples of Forbush decrease precursor events. A few interesting observations on the thundercloud electric field acceleration of muons will also be presented. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss our efforts on the indigenous development of wave-length shifting fiber based plastic scintillator detectors for the array expansion and their performance in the field. This will be followed by a discussion on the C++/ROOT based large scale object oriented data analysis framework, developed for all the streams of the GRAPES-3 data.
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