By Dr Aurobindo Ghose/www.countercurrents.org
As New Delhi prepares its first artificial rain to combat pollution, I recall my father, Prof. Subodh Kumar Ghose, who more than fifty years ago launched salt-filled balloons into the skies — pioneering rainmaking in India.
This August month-end, New Delhi will attempt something unprecedented — using cloud-seeding to settle its toxic air.
Aircraft will spray silver iodide and salt particles into rain-bearing clouds, hoping to trigger showers that can wash away dangerous levels of pollution. For the capital, it is a first. But for me, it is déjà vu.
I grew up with stories of India’s earliest rainmaking experiments, led by my father, Prof. Subodh Kumar Ghose. In September 1968, the Chicago Daily News carried a dispatch from Patna: “A rain-maker, Prof. Subodh Kumar Ghose of Patna University, launched 100 balloons filled with common salt… An hour later, light showers began and lasted 15 minutes.”
For most readers it was a curiosity. For me, it was family history. My father, a civil engineer turned scientist, was known in Patna simply as “the Rainmaker.” Alongside his mentor, Dr. S.K. Banerji of Jadavpur University, he pioneered artificial rainmaking in India decades before New Delhi imagined it.
New Delhi’s upcoming experiment, overseen by IIT Kanpur and approved by the DGCA, will run from August 30 to September 10 at a cost of about ₹3.21 crore.
Modified aircraft will release seeding material into rain-bearing clouds, covering nearly 100 square kilometres per flight. Continuous air-quality monitoring will track changes in PM2.5 and PM10 levels.
The trial has been scheduled for the late monsoon weeks, when the capital still has rain-bearing clouds. Officials admit it is an expensive and uncertain intervention — rainfall cannot be guaranteed — but the hope is that even a short spell of showers could, for a time, settle the city’s toxic haze.
Where New Delhi will rely on aircraft and sophisticated monitoring, my father relied on hydrogen-filled balloons and simple chemistry.
Each balloon carried common salt inside and a strip of sodium taped outside. As the balloons rose into clouds, the sodium ignited on contact with moisture, bursting the balloon and dispersing the salt. The salt particles helped water droplets coalesce, sometimes triggering brief but much-needed showers.
It was an economical, almost handmade approach to rainmaking — a method he believed was better suited for a developing country like India.
Yet even today, scientists remain divided over cloud-seeding.
A professor from IIT Kanpur recently remarked that while artificial rain may help settle suspended dust, the real solution lies in tackling pollution at its source — industrial emissions, vehicle exhaust, crop residue burning.
Research from Rutgers University has also warned of unintended consequences: altered rainfall patterns, ecological disruption, even accelerated warming if such interventions are halted abruptly.
Cloud-seeding, then, is best seen as temporary relief, not a cure — a stopgap while the harder, structural work of clean air continues.
My father knew that too. He never claimed to command the weather; at most, he nudged it.
Sometimes his experiments worked, sometimes they failed. In Colombo, when a cloud-seeding flight brought no rain, the local paper quipped: “By Gosh, if he had done it!” — a pun on his surname.
Still, his efforts earned recognition. He became a Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences, and his experiments in Sri Lanka, Israel, and Australia made him one of the earliest Indians to take weather modification abroad.
To us at home, though, he was simply the man who believed that science could ease the burdens of drought-stricken farmers.
As New Delhi prepares to seed its skies for the first time, it is worth remembering that this is not entirely new ground.
India’s first rainmakers — Dr. S.K. Banerji and my father, Prof. Subodh Kumar Ghose — worked not to clear polluted air, but to bring relief to parched fields and thirsty villages.
Their legacy lies not only in science, but in imagination: the belief that even the most elusive forces of nature might respond to human ingenuity.
Whether New Delhi’s experiment succeeds or falters, it carries forward that same spirit — a reminder that in India’s battles with drought and pollution, the sky has always been part of the story.
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https://countercurrents.org/2025/08/delhis-cloud-seeding-has-precedent-prof-ghose-indias-rainmaker
