India's first: Artificial rain trial by cloud seeding to be held in Jaipur's Ramgarh Dam today

The Rajasthan government’s agriculture department and a private company are scheduled to conduct a cloud seeding trial in Jaipur on Tuesday aimed at producing artificial rain. This is said to be the first of its kind of an experiment in the country.

Cloud seeding is a technique that involves triggering rainfall from clouds that have moisture but are not raining yet. Despite the name, the process is not completely artificial as the technique cannot produce rainfall out of thin air but can only trigger rainfall from existing clouds.

Rajasthan’s agriculture department has joined hands with a Bengaluru-based company, GenX AI, to conduct the trial at Jaipur’s Ramgarh Dam area at around 2 pm on Tuesday, according to CNN-News 18.

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The idea behind the trial is to explore the possibility of using such techniques as a drought relief measure in Rajasthan.

The report said that GenX AI will conduct 60 cloud seeding test drives as part of the collaboration with the state’s agriculture department.

Separately, Rajasthan Agriculture Minister Kirori Lal Meena said that American scientists were involved in the experiment and all relevant approvals had been taken from the Union government.

“For the first time, artificial rain will be done via drone. For this, American scientists came here, and all the departments related to the environment discussed to decide this… All the departments of the government have given a No Objection Certificate (NOC), and now only the NOC from the Civil Aviation Ministry is required… The drones will take a very high altitude, and then this will be done via cloud seeding in Ramgarh Dam,” Meena told ANI.

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A unique feature of this experiment will be that this will be the first time drones will be used in such an experiment, the report said, adding that only piloted aircraft have been used in such experiments so far.

Cloud seeding involves the targeting the right clouds that have moisture but are not precipitating effectively. These clouds are targeted with chemicals, such as silver iodide, potassium iodide, or dry ice, that trigger water vapours to become larger and heavier. Once they are heavy enough, they fall as droplets and rainfall —or snowfall in some cases— takes place.

However, there are important caveats with the exercises as it is not certain that it will always lead to rainfall. Two years ago, the state government conducted another trial with Rs 10 crore but there was no rainfall.