Delhi looked up for help — and tried to control the weather | Here's The Thing  - video Dailymotion

Two aircraft sprayed salt and silver iodide into the clouds to trigger a downpour that could wash Delhi's smog away.

Transcript

00:00Humans have prayed for rain, danced for it, fired rockets into the sky but Delhi tried

00:07to manufacture it for about 60 lakh rupees. Two small aircrafts flew over the city,

00:12releasing a fine mist of salt and silver iodide into the clouds, hoping to trigger

00:16rain that could wash Delhi's toxic air clean. And here's the thing, it's part of a much older

00:21story, one that starts with humanity's obsession with controlling the weather.

00:26Even the military tried it. In 1967, during the Vietnam War, the US launched a covert

00:31cloud seeding mission aimed to extend the monsoon season in Vietnam.

00:35Operation Pupoy was the first military attempt to manipulate the weather.

00:39Soon, scientists and government started testing cloud seeding, the idea that you could create rain

00:44by injecting tiny particles into clouds to help water droplets form. China famously used it before

00:49the 2008 Olympics to clear the smoke. The UAE now seeds clouds almost every week to fight drought.

00:55And India's been experimenting too. Tamil Nadu, Karnataka,

00:58Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra have attempted to seed clouds since the 1980s.

01:03Some positive impact notwithstanding, results have generally been patchy.

01:06In 2019, Maharashtra spent 30 crore rupees to make it rain during a drought and produced

01:11approximately 8.67 mm more rainfall over a two-hour period after seeding.

01:16But Delhi is doing it for a completely different reason, pollution.

01:20With IIT Kanpur's help, they seeded clouds to see if artificial rain could knock the dust and

01:24smoke out of the sky. Even then, the science isn't exact. You can't make rain, you can only

01:30nudge it. But maybe that's the story of Delhi itself, trying to engineer a breath of fresh air

01:35in a city running out of time.