After court case and non-arrival of aircraft,experiment will be held in October The much hyped second phase of cloud seeding experiment in rain shadow regions to be conducted by Pune based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) scheduled on August 25,will now be carried out only in October,after the monsoon starts withdrawing from the northern parts of the country. Inordinate technical delays included a court case by companies bidding for carrying out the experiment and sanctions from various ministeries. Now,a hastened second phase of experimentation will be done in the last phase of monsoon. The experiment,which commenced in 2008 will be carried out in three phases till 2012 with the Earth Sciences Ministry allocating Rs 50 crore for the programme Cloud Aerosol Interaction and Precipitation Enhancement Experiment. (CAIPEEX) The cloud seeding experiment aims to create artificial rain so that the country can tackle drought like situations in the future. The focus of experimentation is Solapur in the state where a doppler radar is supposed to monitor an aircraft spraying salt on targeted clouds and a second plane with instruments measuring the changes and validating the effect. Of the two aircrafts which were to arrive from South Africa and Israel for the experiments,only one arrived on September 11,while the other is to arrive in a day. Though there has been a loss of two months of monsoon period,we are optimistic to carry the second phase of the cloud seeding experiment till October. Though we might have to postpone some part of data collection for next year, said city scientist Dr J R Kulkarni of IITM who spearheads the project. He further adds that getting the requisite sanctions from the respective ministeries to a court case lodged by a company who had bid for carrying out the experiment delayed the entire process which was to start in the early part of the monsoon phase. The IITM had bagged the verdict in its favour by June from the High Court and later by the Supreme Court in the second week of July. All the initial good monsoon phases was lost by then and later there was a list of sanctions to be taken from various departments.
