Circle News on artificial rain

https://www.dailypioneer.com/2025/columnists/when-science-becomes-spectacle.html Thursday, 30 October 2025 | Editor’s take "Every year, Delhi deals with smog in the winter season. A mix of factors make Delhi AQI shoot to sky. The culprits remain the same — vehicular pollution, construction dust, stubble burning, industrial smoke choke the city, the smog hangs due to heavy air — but the remedy differs every year — from water sprinklers to odd-even days for cars to anti-smog guns and giant air purifiers – but nothing seems to work. The reason is not difficult to comprehend. The cosmetic efforts cannot bring about a lasting change. This year is no different. But this time remedy was indeed bizarre — cloud seeding — and it ended up in a fiasco. The much-hyped cloud-seeding experiment conducted by the Delhi Government in collaboration with IIT Kanpur — at a cost of over Rs 3 crore — yielded not a single drop of rain. The Capital’s air remained as toxic as ever. India’s history with cloud seeding — from Mumbai’s Rs 25 crore experiment in 2009 to Andhra Pradesh’s trials a decade earlier — has not yielded desirable results, yet Delhi chose not to learn from past failures. Cloud seeding — a decades-old weather modification technique — involves dispersing particles such as silver iodide into clouds to encourage condensation and rainfall. But for this to work at least 50–60 per cent humidity is required. On Tuesday, Delhi’s skies were cloudy but dry. The available moisture was only 10–15 per cent — woefully short of what was needed. Despite this, an aircraft flew from Kanpur to Delhi to scatter chemicals in what was more an exercise in winning brownie points than a real desire for a lasting solution. While the rains never came, the exchequer shelled out Rs 3 crore for a hasty and ill-conceived attempt to summon showers to cleanse Delhi’s toxic air. Ironically, artificial rain is meant to address water scarcity — not to wash away pollution born of years of administrative neglect and apathy. The failure was almost foreordained. Cloud seeding depends not just on technology but on timing, temperature, and atmospheric moisture. Even when successful, the results are modest — a brief drizzle at best, followed by a rapid return to pre-existing pollution levels. Yet the Delhi Government indulged in these headline-grabbing ventures. These gestures, often timed for maximum media visibility, distract from the harder, less glamorous work of addressing root causes: vehicular emissions, stubble burning, construction dust, and weak enforcement. The Government went ahead with the experiment without taking into consideration the ill-effects of the experiment. Silver iodide, the compound used to induce precipitation, is a heavy metal; its large-scale dispersion can contaminate soil and water systems. When public health is already at stake due to air toxicity, introducing another chemical variable into the environment demands caution, not haste. What the Capital needs is not more cloud seeding but clear-headed governance — one that tackles pollution at its source, invests in public transport, regulates construction, and supports farmers to manage crop residue sustainably. Solutions must be guided by understanding, not theatrics — else they yield nothing but more despair." more  

So so tragic and such a shame really all the political leaders are doing is so wrong … The BJP government at the center will do nothing but hinder all attempts by AAP because they just want to grab power in Delhi even if it means doing so at the cost of innocent lives of children … BJP is actually making citizens suffer so that they will only vote for BJP in Delhi and not vote for AAP more  

it is a lame duck excuse for not wanting anything good happen in delhi till AAP govt is present more