Long before Delhi turned to aircraft-based cloud seeding to clean its toxic air, a scientist in Kolkata was trying to make rain using hydrogen balloons, chemicals and persistence.

Dr Sudhangshu Kumar Banerji, former Director General of the India Meteorological Department (IMD), spent years chasing a question many dismissed as fanciful: could India find its own way to make rain?

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Banerji's path to meteorology began far from weather stations. He studied mathematics at Presidency College and Calcutta University, earned a doctorate in science, and started his career teaching at Science College before working as physicist C V Raman's first research assistant at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science. 

That grounding in rigorous experimentation would later shape his pursuit of artificial rain. 

Building a rain machine

Cloud seeding was still a young field when Banerji turned his attention to it. The technique had been demonstrated in the United States in the late 1940s, when General Electric researchers showed that introducing certain particles into clouds could help trigger........

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