By P.T. Bopanna
Congress-led government in Karnataka headed by chief minister, D.K. Shivakumar (in picture), plans to undertake cloud seeding in the Cauvery basin which could trigger landslides in Kodagu (Coorg) district.
Water resources minister Ramalinga Reddy said drinking water reserves to supply water to Bengaluru and other cities was only sufficient for three to four months. Hence the government was exploring cloud seeding.
The logic behind the exercise is to induce rains in the Cauvery river catchment areas. Since Kodagu has already suffered heavy landslides in recent years, the seeding could rip apart the landscape of Kodagu in the event of a cloud-burst.
The Union government should intervene in the matter and stop permission for seeding. Instead of wasting money on such environmentally hazardous experiments, the government should concentrate on rain water harvesting, dry land farming, and importantly take steps to protect the forests.
There is every possibility of heavy downpour in Kodagu when the cloud seeding exercise is carried out elsewhere in the basin.
For instance, during the S.M. Krishna government, while the cloud seeding was taken up in Dharwad, precipitation occurred around 100 km away in Belgaum. Such uncertainty could be worrying for Kodagu where people are in panic fearing landslides.
Cloud seeding has never been statistically proven to work. An ecologist at Stanford University says, “I think you can squeeze out a little more snow or rain in some places under some conditions, but that’s quite different from a program claiming to reliably increase precipitation.”
The drought in Karnataka is mainly due to the looting of the forests in the Western Ghats at the instance of ministers in successive governments, including the felling of 50,000 trees a few years ago in Kodagu to put up high power transmission lines to supply power to Kerala.
A minister in the Congress government who is close to the Gandhi family, is said to be the agent for the Kerala timber lobby and played a prominent role in the rejecting of the Kasturirangan report to safeguard the fragile ecology of Western Ghats.
