A jheel for Jaipur: Artificial rain no substitute for lack of political will

Some 32 km from Jaipur city sits the Jamwa Ramgarh Lake. It once quenched the thirst of the entire city; but it has almost dried up since 1999.

The Rajasthan government recently tried twice to fill the lake with artificial clouds, but the drones fell down without a single drop of rain falling.

The country's first drone-based cloud seeding campaign was initially scheduled for 31 July 2025 at Jamwa Ramgarh Dam — but at the time, it turned out that many districts in Rajasthan were actually flooded, for a change, with rainfall 130 per cent more than expected. So the project was shelved.

Then, on 12 August, pujas were performed, women sang folk songs, ministers and MLAs gathered and, due to all this, naturally, thousands of people gathered.

There were such large crowds to see this spectacle that the police had to initiate a lathi charge.

That day, after two failed attempts between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., the drone finally flew up into the air — and fell down.

Similarly, on 17 August, a crowd gathered again. The drone flew... but fell face down into a field near Gopalganj village.

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Sawai Ram Singh II had built the dam that created this 15.5 sq km lake in 1876 to quench the thirst of Jaipur.

After Independence, the area of ​​Jaipur city grew, but unfortunately, the area of ​​Ramgarh Lake kept on decreasing.

Even so, during the 1982 Asian Games, rowing competitions were organised on the Lake. But after that, encroachments upon the river increased so much that the canal started disappearing and, after 1999, the water in it stopped flowing altogether.

This artificial lake had originally been created by building a dam across the Banganga river. Many rivers of Rajasthan are now fighting to hold on to their very existence — the Banganga is a leading example.

The Banganga, originating in the hills of Bairat, has no tributary. The river, 380 km long, passes through Jaipur, Dausa, Bharatpur and finally merges with the Yamuna River near Fatehabad Agra in Uttar Pradesh. It was once called ‘Kamdhenu’ by farmers for bringing the much-wished-for irrigation they needed.

Till circa 1996–97, the river held so much water that a fair was held every year on the banks of the Banganga in Med village. Thousands of people used to attend it.

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Now, there is a Madhosagar Dam Project in Dausa district on the Banganga. The fresh water of this river was what allows the wetlands in Ghana Bird National Park, Bharatpur, to flourish.

After the Chambal, the Banganga is the second river in Rajasthan whose water merges directly with the Yamuna. Since its confluence with Yamuna takes place across fractured streams, it is also popularly known as the 'broken river'.

This river still flows fast beyond Jaipur, but it has dried up near Ramgarh, where the lake is (or used to be).

Once, the water in the Ramgarh dam used to come not only from the Banganga (from Viratnagar), but also the Madhobeni river (from Manoharpur), the Gomti canal, and other streams. Now, the Banganga, originating near Daulaj village in Viratnagar, is the main contributor of water to the Ramgarh dam — or well, not any more.

Actually, not only the common people but the government too has undertaken construction on river's course and the dam. There are numerous encroachments now between the Banganga and the lake, and the administration has continued to turn a blind eye to them. Many anicuts and check dams have been added. As a result, the flow of water has continued to dwindle.

Of course, all this did not happen in a single day — but as the waters receded, people claimed the plains as farmland, hundreds of acres of it.

These encroachers further changed the main course of ​​the river near the Daulaj and Gyanpura villages of Viratnagar. The course of ​​the river has now disappeared for about 4.5 km, at a distance of 6 km from the hills of Daulaj en route the temple of Kapasan Mata, past Gyanpura.

Similar encroachments are in the way of streams that used to drain into the dam from the Madhobeni and Gomti rivers. A monitoring committee of the High Court has banned any kind of work in the river’s course and the subtending canals, but due to administrative negligence, illegal mining of soil is in full swing along the river and canals.

Today, governments — both the centre and state administrations — have started taking remedial measures, indeed; but their real purpose is to show off, rather than to find solutions to problems through scientific and practical measures on the ground.

And so it is that the agriculture department of Rajasthan has awarded the contract for filling the dam with artificial rain to GenX AI, a technology company with offices in the US and in Bangalore in India.

To create this artificial rain, silver iodide and several other chemicals are sprayed from airplanes, which should create dry ice particles — in effect, solid carbon dioxide. The problem is that liquid droplets do not form when it melts in this heat; it simply dissipates into gas.

If there is even a little moisture in the surrounding clouds, it should stick to the dry ice particles, increasing the weight of the cloud and leading to rain. But for this to happen successfully, there must be at least 40 per cent of moisture in the atmosphere — and only then, it may rain for a short time.

This drone-based cloud seeding campaign has now failed, therefore — it is, in a month where the rest of North India is all but drowning, not too dry in Rajasthan after the false promise of a super-wet July.

So now the foreign company is saying that to fill the dam with artificial rain, the drone will have to be flown at a height of 10,000 ft — whereas the central government does not allow drones to fly above 400 ft. Even if we are to assume that the foreign company (with offices in India) was not aware of this rule earlier, the officials of the Rajasthan government must have known about it?

Anyway, two years ago, a similar attempt to create artificial rain at the Bhaisunda dam in Chittorgarh, at a cost of Rs 10 crore, had also failed. The excuse given then was (again) a lack of moisture.

In fact, such superficial measures cannot be not the solution to the environmental crisis created by ourselves.

To fill the Ramgarh lake with water, it is necessary that all the three water streams feeding it be allowed to reach the dam uninterrupted — and this can happen only when the encroachments in their courses are removed.

This is not a task that can be undertaken and completed in a day, doubtless. It calls for firm political will to do the hard thing, to convince and bring people along, paired with a decidedly environmental perspective.

Does anyone think that today's government has this?

Pankaj Chaturvedi is editor of indiaclimatechange.com