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Scientists in India’s capital Delhi have drawn up plans to create artificial rain. It’s an unconventional attempt to reduce smog as authorities look for ways to ease the country’s catastrophic air pollution.
The plan is to drop salts or silver iodide from an airplane into the clouds to encourage the formation of rain droplets – a process known as “cloud seeding.” Supporters hope the resulting rain will help clear pollutants from the dirty air.
The Delhi regional government, which is organizing the project along with scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, is awaiting approvals from national government bodies and hopes to complete the project this week.
The program comes after air quality in northern India returned to crisis levels. Delhi was the most polluted city in the world this week, according to Swiss group IQAir.
IQAir’s air quality index, which measures levels of deadly pollutants such as very small particles PM2.5, regularly rises above 400 in Delhi in November – a level considered “dangerous” for the capital’s 30 million residents.
A University of Chicago study this year called air pollution “the biggest threat to human health in India,” cutting the life expectancy of an average Indian by more than five years. The study found that residents of Delhi would have a 12-year longer life expectancy if particulate matter pollution was reduced in line with World Health Organization guidelines.
Cloud seeding is “an intervention to create some calmness,” said Sachchida Nand Tripathi, a professor at IIT Kanpur who is working on the rainmaking project. “If you have a situation like this, if you have an AQI of more than 400 for several weeks. . . Seeding could be a more viable option.”
Others have criticized the plan. “What the government is trying to do is, firstly, to give the impression that it is doing something,” said Jyoti Pande Lavakare, a clean air activist. “Second, temporarily reduce these toxic pollutant levels – in a kind of firefighting mode – if they become an issue of political importance.”
International attention to air pollution in India has become a source of embarrassment for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. During this month’s Cricket World Cup, players from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and England skipped training sessions or used asthma inhalers to cope with the dirty air.
There is limited scientific evidence on the effectiveness of weather modification efforts, but Indian authorities say previous cloud seeding around the monsoon season has had some success in increasing rainfall in drought-prone areas. Scientists hope to seed about 300 square kilometers of clouds over Delhi, but believe the plan depends on there being enough moisture in the air in the coming weeks.
The Indian government launched a national clean air program in 2019 and says it has made some progress in Delhi © Anushree Fadnavis/PortalChina has had an arsenal of cloud-forming aircraft and artillery for decades, tasked with reducing damage from hailstorms, alleviating droughts and improving air quality, as well as providing good weather at high-profile events such as the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But it was China’s strict campaign to control industrial emissions around Beijing that helped clear the capital’s notoriously hazy air.
Delhi’s cloud seeding plan is “kind of a Hail Mary,” said Bhargav Krishna, an air quality and health expert. “It reflects the failure of the institutions originally tasked with regulating air pollution.” . It seems like a last resort to try something when nothing else works.”
India’s air pollution poses an annual threat caused by a combination of factors, including industrial emissions, automobile exhaust and smoke from burning crop residues in neighboring states. This week it was also exacerbated by fireworks to celebrate the Diwali festival on Sunday.
But the search for a permanent solution has continually puzzled India’s policymakers.
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The Indian government launched a national clean air program in 2019 to address the problem, and authorities argue they have had some success in reducing PM2.5 levels in Delhi and elsewhere. But a range of other measures, from so-called smog towers to clean ambient air to long-delayed plans to clean up power plant emissions, have done little to ease the crisis.
Analysts said India’s efforts, unlike China, were hampered by a lack of both political will and state capacity. A study earlier this year by Krishna and then-colleagues at the New Delhi-based think tank Center for Policy Research found that seven out of eight state environmental protection agencies — the bodies tasked with regulating air quality — had technical staff vacancy rates of at least 40 percent.
Official inaction is made possible by low public awareness of the dangers of air pollution and the measures needed to combat it. Although politicians from Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and the rival Aam Aadmi Party, which governs Delhi, regularly argue over who is responsible, analysts said air quality has not become a campaign issue, leaving officials with limited incentives to address the problem.
“There is only one way to reduce pollution and that is to reduce emissions,” Lavakare said, adding Modi must take responsibility for solving the problem. “There is no political will to achieve this. . . That’s because it doesn’t come from above.”