Delhi’s mixed, or rather unsuccessful, attempts at cloud seeding this past week are a classic display of grabbing the wrong end of the stick. As a measure to bring down the air pollution by inducing rain or moisture, based on experiments around the world, cloud seeding would rank as an expensive and unreliable way to address the issue of poor-quality air or, specifically, to bring down the Air Quality Index (AQI) levels. Even IIT-Kanpur, with whom the Delhi government collaborated on the experiment, stated that cloud seeding cannot be a long-term answer to Delhi’s perennial pollution problem. Despite the lack of rain, the experiment helped bring about limited moisture conditions which, in turn, marginally improved the air quality. Delhi’s AQI, in the past two weeks, has been in the ‘very p

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