BJP govt’s artificial rain experiment was pure political theatrics

When politics is reduced to one-upmanship, theatrics are inevitable. Delhi’s much-publicised attempt to induce artificial rain by seeding clouds on Tuesday was just that. In a bid to demonstrate its sincerity in helping the smog-choked capital, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government ended up spending over Rs one crore without achieving the desired result. But the failure was hardly surprising. Last year, the AAP-headed Delhi government sought the Union Environment, Forest and Wildlife Ministry to consider cloud seeding as an emergency measure to improve air quality in Delhi during the winter months.

So, expert opinion was sought from the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the Commission for Air Quality Management in NCR and Adjoining areas (CAQM), and the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) regarding the feasibility of cloud seeding for artificial rainfall in the national capital during winter. On December 5, 2024, Union Minister of State for Environment Kirti Vardhan Singh presented the expert opinion in the Rajya Sabha.

It will be interesting to see what experts said in some detail: “Winter clouds in the region are primarily formed due to Western Disturbances (WD), which are short-lived and travel from West to East. When low clouds form due to WDs, they typically result in natural rainfall over Northwest India, eliminating the need for cloud seeding. High-altitude clouds, which are typically at elevations above 5-6 km, cannot be seeded due to aircraft limitations. Furthermore, effective cloud seeding requires specific cloud conditions, which are generally absent during Delhi’s cold and dry winter months.”

But that was not the only problem. Even if suitable clouds were present, the dry atmospheric layer beneath them could cause any developed precipitation to evaporate before reaching the surface, the experts said. “Additionally, concerns about the uncertainties, efficacy, and potential adverse effects of cloud seeding chemicals remain.” One need not be a scientist to know that in less than a year, meteorological conditions in a region don’t undergo a major change, so it was obvious that artificial rain in Delhi-NCR was highly unlikely, if not impossible. And the Rekha Gupta government opted for it with considerable fanfare.

Had the experiment been successful by fluke, the saffron ecosystem would have burst with irrational exuberance, as if the ruling party had solved all the problems in the national capital. The incident underlined another aspect of Indian politics, especially of BJP leaders—self-righteousness. The experiment failed, but Delhi’s Environment Minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa kept harping that the experiment was “successful” from a scientific perspective. One wonders what kind of success he was talking about. What was there in Delhi-NCR that only Sirsa and BJP leaders could see but no one else could?

But then, the cloud-seeding exercise was essentially political, intended to score brownie points rather than address the issue of air pollution.

The purpose was to show that the AAP government in Delhi was a failure. Even the AAP government had also toyed with the idea of artificial rain but didn’t try after it received adverse opinion. The BJP government essentially wanted to tell the people of the capital, ‘They couldn’t do that, but we did.’ Now that such theatrics have boomeranged on them, it is time the BJP government thinks of doing something that can substantially address the issue and bring some relief to the people in Delhi.