Atmospheric Politics and the Aporias of Citizen Science in Delhi

• In Event: Citizen Science, Law and Policy - I

Abstract

This paper reads the ongoing citizen science activities around Delhi’s toxic air against the millennial activism that was strongly criticised as constituting elite environmentalism. Then, the judiciary, approached by environmental advocates wary of a supposedly disinterested state and advised by technical experts, had ordered a number of actions to clean the city's air, including the relocation of industries to the peripheries and the conversion of its public transport fleet to natural gas from highly-polluting diesel. These actions, however, led to large-scale unemployment and loss of livelihoods for industrial workers and those in the city's largely informal transportation sector and were widely criticised as socially-disconnected.

Toxic air is once again at the centre of discussions on regional futures. Alongside established civil society advocates, more footloose data designers, open-data activists and certain 'air' entrepreneurs import--or design their own-- low-cost monitoring devises, crowdsource data, and challenge official state science. They also use social media to disseminate information and call for actions, such as public protests to push the state to ‘act’, even as there are divergent opinions on pollution’s causes and policy priorities. Using interviews with scientists and advocates, and observation of events since 2015, the paper argues that while the black-box of expertise has been opened, a particular kind of technologization of citizenship has accompanied the process. On the other hand, reading the place of ‘the people’ in the technoscientific discourse shows the multiple paradoxes and aporias of doing citizen science in the global south.

Author

• Rohit Negi, School of Global Affairs, Ambedkar University Delhi