Delhi seeks artificial rain to tackle serious air pollution crisis

With air pollution in Delhi reaching alarming proportions, the capital’s Environment Minister Gopal Rai said on Tuesday that the administration was open to the idea of artificial rain to ease the toxic smog that covers the city each winter. The air quality in the region continued to deteriorate, with residents complaining of respiratory issues.

Cloud-seeding process

Northern India is known to be the most polluted region every winter because of the trapping of dust, vehicle emissions, and agricultural fires in neighboring states such as Punjab and Haryana. This traps a very dense, hazardous haze over Delhi and the surrounding regions. In 2023, a plan was mooted for a cloud-seeding process wherein salt is used to induce rainfall but had to be abandoned because of unfavorable weather conditions.

The pollution level has outreach alarming levels sought by the Centre’s intervention says the Environment Minister.  Some stations even touched levels above 400 AQI scores. “The next 10 days are quite crucial…help us get permission for artificial rain, call a meeting,” he appealed.

Respiratory illness in India

It has brought on significant health impact as the hospitals in Delhi and surrounding cities have registered more admissions because of respiratory illness attributed to pollution. “We have seen an increase of 20-30% in asthma, bronchitis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients,” says Dr. Prashant Saxena, Senior Director of Pulmonology at Fortis Hospital. Dr. Kuldeep Kumar, who heads the critical care and pulmonology department at C K Birla Hospital in Gurugram, said that there were more than 50 daily cases of air pollution, with some needing hospitalization.

South Asia is a big threat to public health and the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute said in its report last year that air pollution could reduce life expectancy by more than five years. On Tuesday, Swiss-based IQAir ranked Delhi as the world’s second most polluted city after Lahore in Pakistan, where emergency measures have also been adopted.

Lahore officials blamed some of the air pollution on pollutants drifting in from India, an issue they said they would raise diplomatically.