Faced with the prospect of a fourth consecutive drought year, Karnataka has finally begun a project to harness rain-bearing clouds over the next two months. In the ongoing monsoon period, Karnataka is facing a cumulative rainfall deficiency of around 25 per cent till date, while the deficit across the country as a whole is four per cent.

‘Varshadhare’, a cloud-seeding project, was flagged off on Monday by Karnataka's Panchayat Raj Minister HK Patil and Agriculture Minister Krishna Byregowda at the Jakkur aerodrome in Bengaluru.

Cloud-seeding is a kind of weather modification procedure that attempts to enhance the amount of precipitation from the clouds to generate more rain. Karnataka is resorting to cloud-seeding after 14 years. Previously, the State had carried out such an operation in 2003.

Hoysala Projects Pvt Ltd, the designated agency to carry out the cloud-seeding, will take up the operations from the airports of Hubli and Bengaluru over the next 60 days.

Three Doppler radars are being set up at Bengaluru, Gadag and Surpur (Yadgir district) to detect the rain-bearing clouds and enable their seeding. As part of the seeding strategy, special aircraft will disperse the chemical silver iodide as they fly through rain-bearing clouds that will trigger and enhance the precipitation. “We expect to enhance the rainfall precipitation by around 15-20 per cent," said Srinivas, Project Manager at Hoysala Projects.

Rain deficiency has hurt the pace of the ongoing kharif sowing operations while impacting the inflows in reservoirs and tanks. Several towns in North and Central Karnataka continue to face drinking water scarcity. According to the IMD, cumulative rainfall deficit in South Interior Karnataka is pegged at 26 per cent, while in North Interior Karnataka the deficiency is 19 per cent. Coastal Karnataka faces a rain deficit of 23 per cent.

According to G Srinivas Reddy, Director, Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre, though the rainfall had picked up in August, cumulative deficiency exists in 17 of the 30 districts. About 90 of the 176 taluks still face deficit rains, while three had scanty precipitation. Only 12 taluks had excess rains, while 71 had normal rainfall so far.

Besides Karnataka, Kerala also faces a 26 per cent deficiency in rainfall so far. Eight meteorological subdivisions accounting for 21 per cent of the geographical area of the country are facing cumulative deficiency this monsoon season, including West and East Madhya Pradesh, Western UP, Haryana, Chandigarh and Delhi.

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