An all-caps message claiming Bill Gates is responsible for last week’s unusual rain. Most of us in India have seen it. A blurry screenshot circulating in WhatsApp groups, and viral videos on Social media gets a lot of attention and some laughs, but then it all normalizes in some days. Like those were okay and a very normal thing to be happening not in India but all over other parts of the world too.
But here is the thing. That forward is very real, very serious, and almost entirely absent from mainstream Indian conversation. So let us talk about What Is Solar Geoengineering, and Why Does It Matter to India?
What Is Solar Geoengineering, and Why Does It Matter to India?
Solar geoengineering, or Solar Radiation Management (SRM), is a proposed method of cooling the Earth by reflecting a portion of sunlight back into space. The most widely discussed approach involves injecting tiny sulfate particles into the stratosphere, where they would scatter incoming solar radiation. However, Solar geoengineering does NOT remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It would only mask warming temporarily. Ocean acidification, caused by CO2 absorption, would continue unaffected.
In India, the rainfall associated with the South Asian monsoon has such a large impact on the region’s resources that even today the Indian economy functions as a kind of gamble on the seasonal summer monsoon rains.
The Bill Gates Connection: What Actually Happened
Since 2007, Bill Gates has funded research initiatives that provide grants for experiments related to solar radiation management. A Harvard experiment named SCoPEx was supported in part by these initiatives. The project, formally called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, became the focal point of years of online speculation and outrage.
The project was an experiment designed to collect data for the purpose of refining computer models that simulate solar radiation management, not to implement an actual test of the practice. The most the experiment sought to do was release 4.4 pounds of non-toxic dust from a weather balloon 12 miles high in the sky. No secret chemicals. No weather control.
The SCoPEx experiment was officially no longer being pursued as of March 2024, according to a statement from the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard.
“The experiment just became the focus of that conversation and got blown out of proportion.” — Prof. David Keith, Harvard
According to The Harvard Crimson, SCoPEx was abandoned following a report by its own advisory committee — a decision that came 10 years after the concept was first conceived and after sustained opposition from Indigenous communities, climate activists including Greta Thunberg, and the Saami Council of Sweden.
So when Delhi experienced unusual rain in March 2026 and social media lit up again blaming Gates, meteorologists pointed to a natural weather phenomenon known as a Western Disturbance as the main cause.
Gates did not make that unusual rain in India.
Solar Geoengineering: Why is it not just an experiment?
A modeling study by Alan Robock and colleagues claimed that both tropical and Arctic sulfur dioxide injection would disrupt the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing precipitation to the food supply for billions of people. While that finding has been debated and some later studies found less dramatic results, the underlying uncertainty is itself the problem. Nobody fully knows what would happen to the monsoon if a major geoengineering program were deployed unilaterally by another country.
There is also what scientists call “termination shock.” Upon the termination of geoengineering, the climatic conditions including temperature, precipitation, winds, and moisture would abruptly change to what they would have been under the global warming scenario.
In other words, if geoengineering begins and then suddenly stops, the climate could snap back rapidly and violently. For a country whose agriculture, water supply, and economy depend on the monsoon arriving predictably every year, that prospect is alarming.
The Monsoon Question: India’s Existential Stake
A study published in Scientific Reports, using different global climate models from the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project, found that under solar geoengineering scenarios, a dry bias develops over most of the Indian landmass, even as precipitation near the Arabian Sea coast shows some increase.
Another 2008 modelling study by researcher Alan Robock and colleagues (published in the Journal of Geophysical Research) went further, claiming that both tropical and Arctic sulphur dioxide injection would disrupt the Asian and African summer monsoons, reducing precipitation for billions of people.
“If only one hemisphere is cooled, you get ‘crazy results’ such as turning off the Indian monsoon.” — Gernot Wagner, Columbia University / Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program
The monsoon is exquisitely sensitive to the balance of temperature between the Northern and Southern hemispheres. If SAI were deployed unevenly by one country or bloc acting unilaterally, it could severely weaken or disrupt the monsoon circulation.
So we really do not have consensus. And deploying a technology without consensus, at planetary scale, with India’s food security hanging in the balance, is not a risk that can be quietly filed away.
The Governance Gap Nobody Is Talking About
The controversial venture-backed startup Make Sunsets has repeatedly launched weather balloons filled with sulfur dioxide that it claims likely burst in the stratosphere. A private company, with no international mandate and no consent from countries like India, is already doing this commercially.
There is no clear global authority to regulate such technologies, raising ethical and political questions. The world has no agreed-upon rules. No international treaty governs who can inject what into the stratosphere, or what happens to countries whose monsoons are disrupted as a result.
India’s Scientists Are Engaged. India’s Diplomats Are Not.
But India is not entirely absent from this conversation. The Department of Science and Technology of India launched a major research and development program in 2017 to understand the implications of geoengineering on developing countries. One of the major scientific objectives was to study the sensitivity of the tropical hydrological cycle, particularly in the South Asian monsoon region, to stratospheric sulfate geoengineering.
Indian researchers at IIT Delhi and the Indian Institute of Science have been producing peer-reviewed work on this subject for years. The science is being done. But at the level of international diplomacy, India is largely absent from the rooms where decisions are taking shape.
What India Should Be Demanding Right Now
India has over 600 million people whose food security, water supply, and economic stability are directly tied to the monsoon arriving on time and in the right quantities. That monsoon could be disrupted by technologies being developed, and in some cases already deployed, without India having a meaningful say in the matter.
The demand is not for India to oppose all geoengineering research. But India should be loudly demanding a seat at every international table where these discussions happen, pushing for a global framework that requires the consent of affected nations before any large-scale deployment is ever attempted.
The viral WhatsApp forward had it wrong about Gates making it rain. But the fear embedded in that message, the fear that decisions are being made about our skies by people far away who do not answer to us, is not wrong at all.
That fear deserves a serious political response, not just a fact-check.
Sources and Further Reading
- Harvard Crimson — SCoPEx Project Abandoned (March 2024): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/3/20/harvard-geoengineering-project-abandoned/
- Christian Science Monitor — Indigenous Groups Oppose Solar Geoengineering: https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2021/0610/Solar-geoengineering-Not-in-our-skies-say-Indigenous-groups
- Harvard SEAS — Laboratory Experiments on Particles for Solar Geoengineering: https://seas.harvard.edu/news/laboratory-experiments-particles-solar-geoengineering-demonstrate-limits-models
- PMC / NCBI — Response of the Indian Summer Monsoon to Solar Geoengineering: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4240955/
- Keutsch Group — SCoPEx Project Overview: https://www.keutschgroup.com/scopex
- Salata Institute — Final SCoPEx Advisory Committee Report: https://salatainstitute.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Final-SCoPEx-AC-Report-With-Appendices.pdf
- David Keith — SCoPEx Scientific Paper: https://davidkeith.earth/publication/stratospheric-controlled-perturbation-experiment-scopex-a-small-scale-experiment-to-improve-understanding-of-the-risks-of-solar-geoengineering/
- Columbia University Climate School — Solar Geoengineering Risks: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2024/04/24/solar-geoengineering-to-cool-the-planet-is-it-worth-the-risks/
- Santa Clara University — Ethical Evaluation of Stratospheric Aerosol Injection: https://www.scu.edu/environmental-ethics/resources/an-ethical-evaluation-of-stratospheric-aerosol-injection/
- Answers in Genesis — Chemtrails, Cloud Seeding, and Climate Change: https://answersingenesis.org/environmental-science/chemtrails-cloud-seeding-climate-change-oh-my/
- Smithsonian Magazine — Risks and Rewards of Geoengineering: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/risks-rewards-possible-ramifications-geoengineering-earths-climate-180971666/
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