These days, it is like clockwork. At the onset of every winter, a grey haze hovers over New Delhi and its nearby satellite towns – a toxic mix of exhaust, smoke, and dust that blurs skylines and stings the lungs.
It comes one week after the skies were lit up with firecrackers – which added to the fumes – as people celebrated the annual Hindu festival of light, Diwali. Delhi’s new government, led by Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, believes the answer – perhaps now for mitigation, rather than preventing – lies in making it rain, artificially, by “seeding clouds” in order to clear away the fumes.
