Decolonizing Science: Episode 2

This podcast features Dr. Pallavi Pant, an air quality scientist and founder of the web platform India Air Quality Hub. This is the second episode of the “Decolonizing Science” podcast series, featuring a conversation with Emmett McKinney, Priyanka deSouza, and Jia-Hui Lee. A transcription of the conversation is below. It has been edited for clarity.

Welcome to CoLab Radio. This is a publication of the Community Innovators Lab at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Our show is dedicated to centering the first-person narratives of activists, scholars, and researchers doing the work of social justice.  My name is Emmett McKinney and I am delighted to introduce you to today’s guest, Dr. Pallavi Pant.

Dr. Pant is an air quality scientist by day, and she also runs the India Air Quality Hub, which connects scientists doing vital work across the continent. You can learn more about the India Air Quality Hub at IndiaAQ.blog. Dr. Pant was featured in our first episode with two doctoral students at MIT, so if you like this, you should definitely check out that one too. And stay tuned for the rest of this series on “Decolonizing Science”. Alright, here’s our conversation. Enjoy!

Pallavi Pant: My work on air pollution started maybe 10 years ago. I grew up in Delhi and always heard stories about how air pollution in the city was really bad, and that it was affecting all of us. As a kid in school, I had seen these horrific pictures of lungs of people who lived in Delhi and they looked just as bad as the lungs of a smoker. Those kinds of images are coming back in a way and people are using them again to get people thinking about what the impact of air pollution on our health is.

Once I finished my master's degree, I wanted to work for a little while, so I worked for a foundation that was just setting up in India, working on climate and energy issues, and started working more at the intersection of climate and air pollution efforts, trying to find linkages between the two and understanding how each of them is impacting the other. And as I did more and more of that work, I realized that I probably needed more technical understanding of the subject. So I moved to England to start the PhD program and my one and only criteria had been that I should be able to do fieldwork in India.

My work was primarily focused on understanding PM2.5, which is really small particulate matter. It's in the air all around us. My goal was to study what the levels are in Delhi and how different sources are contributing to the levels of PM2.5 we see in the city. At the outset, it was fairly straightforward. We were going to collaborate with a university in India. I was going to go to field work. I was familiar with the city. I was learning all of the different technical aspects of doing measurements and trying to understand how we look at source contributions.

But then as we started to move forward into actual discussions on how the project would happen, we started hitting glitches. Sometimes the instruments weren't available. Sometimes the locations where we wanted to do sampling were really not amenable, we couldn’t go there. At one point, it became so difficult to work in India that I just decided to do something else instead, because I needed to finish my PhD. And there was one point in time where I was like, why am I even doing this? But anyway, I persisted. At the same time, I continued thinking about ways to continue my research in India.  

Finally, we were able to independently get funding to do some work. But at different conferences and in meetings, as I met researchers and PhD students, early career researchers from India, I realized that a lot of them weren't quite familiar with the literature on air pollution in the country. They hadn't always seen the studies that had been published. They weren't keeping up with what the policy developments in Delhi and in India were, and how that all made sense. And that was the origin for the 'Air Quality in India' platform that I have been running.

I started the platform in 2013 - I finished my PhD in 2014 just for reference - and at that point, my only goal was to find a way to bring together young researchers who were either from India or working on India's air pollution, and make sure that they can access the information that is out there and try and find ways to make it a collaborative process where we could all learn from each other.

Priyanka: Can you tell us more about the barriers these researchers faced in keeping up with this literature?

Pallavi Pant: In a lot of cases when Indian students are doing PhDs, postdocs outside of India, they are working on specific projects. Sometimes they're projects where the PI has funding. Sometimes they're projects which have been ongoing, and they join them. So they're not always focused on India. They're not always explicitly looking at projects that would focus on India. Maybe most of them do have an interest in figuring out ways to work in India. And one of the common things I heard was, “well, there's nothing going on, nobody's doing anything. We never see anything published.”

This was partly true because often research that's done in smaller cities is not considered important enough to be published in international peer-reviewed journals that we most often look at when we think about scientific literature. And people are not really, in that case, familiar with what's going on. You have to go out and make an effort to find out who are the institutions? Who are the professors? What are they doing? Are they publishing anything? Is there anything in the grey literature? And to be honest, for any PhD student or postdoc, they only have so many hours in a day. They're not going to go looking unless they really need to, or they really want to, or they have nothing better to do which was probably the case for me. 

Priyanka: In this context, what is the importance of local efforts? Do international scientists have a role to play in fostering these efforts? And should that be their responsibility?

Pallavi Pant: I think there's definitely a role that international scientists can play, at least in helping us put in perspective what kinds of efforts have been taken in places elsewhere - what has worked and what hasn’t worked. And I think what then needs to happen is, any kind of intervention or solution that worked in the U.S. may not work the same way in India, or something that might work in India may not work the same way in Nepal. And the role of local science is very critical in then understanding what works best in our situation because the political systems are often very different. The institutions that exist to try and actually implement those solutions are very different. There are legal, regulatory barriers, as well as just challenges in terms of resources. 

And I think there can be a really good middle ground that international scientists and scientists from within India can work at, where they're trying to both improve science for the sake of science, and helping us understand the processes and systems. But then contextualizing it and making sure that those results are important and useful in making policies and improving the quality of air that all Indians are breathing.

Priyanka: More and more people now are aware of Delhi – aware of the sources of air pollution, aware of what needs to be done. But nothing is happening because air pollution is more than just a scientific phenomena. It's a political problem. It's an urban planning problem. However, as scientists, we have a lot of authority in framing air pollution in a certain manner. Do you have any thoughts on how scientists can work better with people from other backgrounds to have air pollution be seen in this broader sense?

Pallavi Pant: Again, I think a really interesting question because it brings to fore the whole notion of the air pollution debate [which] at least in India has been very much around traffic as the problem or crop burning, in most recent years, as the problem. We often tend to look for the one scapegoat that we can go to and say if you fix this, we will solve the problem. That's almost never true.

One of the ways in which even I have struggled for some time is, how do I make sure that I'm still able to be true to the science but make it easy and accessible and relevant enough for others to use it and interact with it?

It's a long process. It's never easy. All of us are trained in very certain terms, in terms of what is and is not good data. One example I can bring up to talk about it further is low-cost sensing technology, which is increasingly proliferating. There are a number of citizen science efforts in India and many parts of the world. But these systems don't technically compare with high-quality reference-grade instrumentation that regulatory bodies typically use to measure air quality.

The question is, do we really need that kind of detail and that kind of sophistication and measurement technology? For some purposes, yes we do. And it's fair to try and aspire for that standard for those particular reasons. When we are trying to make sure that the city or town is meeting the air quality standard, we want to make sure we do it properly because there are legal implications associated with it. 

But if you're trying to understand what the general air quality in an area is, if you're trying to understand whether doing an intervention in point A will be better or point B will be better, is that low-cost sensing enough? If I think purely as a scientist, I would quickly start thinking, no, there's too much uncertainty in these numbers. I wouldn't want to trust it. But then if I take a step back, and I say, you know what, this is not always a scientific process. We're trying to understand the best way we can get to the solution. And probably that is enough for us.

And in many ways, most of the scientists, especially those who have trained in air pollution modeling measurement and technology often have to overcome that hurdle to say, how do we look beyond just the numbers? How do we look beyond just the precision of the instrument or precision of the number we are producing? And this question of, how much information is good enough? How much do we really need to know, before we can make informed decisions?

For the right reasons, I think science still needs to aim for accuracy and precision and knowing it to the best of our capabilities. But when we start thinking about places like India, where we need solutions today, we also need to think about what's the best way to get to it without spending millions and millions of dollars and spending five years just understanding what the quality of the air is.

Emmett: I'm interested in your experience of being a "pragmatist scientist", as in somebody thinks of it as their job not just to improve science for sciences-sake, but to advance society.

Pallavi Pant: It's been hard. There definitely are instances that I can think back to where people would question whether I was "scientist enough" because I was trying to find that middle ground and cases where people thought, "Well, you're a scientist, what do you know about these issues?" And I think, interacting with a wide group of stakeholders that I have been, again, fortunate enough to do and learning from their experience and perspectives over time, I would say there are still times when I struggle to place myself in the right position to say, "Well, I'm not going to say this because this is not my place, or this is not my role." But it is a hard thing to do. And I would also say that, for me, this isn't just about science, this is really about improving the air because I have lived in that air for a very long time.

Priyanka: How has inequality, in terms of people's exposure to air pollution based on socio-economic factors, informed your work?

Pallavi Pant: That, I think, in many ways underlies most of what scientists are doing. Thinking about it from a very scientific perspective, most researchers - and I wouldn’t say all, but most - would focus on the science and not so much on what the socio-economic realities in the area are, or what the implications of choosing to live in a certain place versus not are. In thinking about the way the air pollution discussion has evolved over time, it's always sort of pitted one group against the other.

And in the current context, for example, air pollution levels in Delhi are extremely high, they tend to be really high around this time every year - end of October, beginning of November for the last few years. We found the scapegoat and it's the farmers who are burning crop stubble. And that's become the very powerful narrative. Now every organization is trying to work on that issue; they're trying to fix the problem. But the reality is, even if we fixed all of it today, the air pollution problem will not go away. That's one.

The second is, a lot of this narrative is driven by people who live in Delhi and are getting exposed to these high levels of air pollution that are coming in as a result of this crop stubble burning. But there are many people who live in villages next to the places where this stubble is being burned, and we're not spending even five minutes talking about what their exposures are and how they're getting affected and what the impact on their health might be.

Similarly in Delhi itself, in winter, the temperatures drop down quite a bit and a lot of people who live in open housing or who work overnight, or who live on the streets, resort to burning wood, waste, other kinds of fuel that they can find. And that contributes to the air pollution in the city, undoubtedly. But we then start saying, "Hey, you know, it's the fault of this person who's burning all this stuff". But they're doing it to keep themselves warm, and they're doing it so that they can survive the night and get to work the next day. 

So how fair are we being in saying that it is their problem versus a systematic issue that probably needs to be solved by bigger forces than those individuals? There isn't enough work along those lines in India and in many developing countries. I think our narrative is very much data-driven to this point. We don't bring in economics, we don't bring in the socio-economic factors that influence a lot of this decision process.

This has been CoLab Radio – a production of the MIT Community Innovators Lab. We appreciate you taking some time to listen and want to remind you: this podcast is for you. We want to not only tell the stories that we see, but uncover the ones we don’t. If you have a story to tell, let us know by sending us a message at colabcom@mit.edu. And stay tuned, as there is more to come. 

[For more information, you can follow Dr. Pant on Twitter. You may also visit the Air Quality in India platform, or see their work on Instagram @airqualityindia or Facebook @indiaaq.]

About the Interviewers:

Priyanka deSouza is a PhD researcher at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) in the Senseable City Lab. Priyanka studies air pollution from both a scientific and urban planning perspective, with a focus on East Africa.

Emmett McKinney is a Producer for CoLab Radio, where he works to amplify community narratives. As a Master in City Planning student (2020), Emmett works to ground policies aimed “sustainability” and “resilience” in communities’ lived experiences. His current research focuses on transportation and water infrastructure, and how equity and justice are integrated into data-driven planning. Outside of CoLab, Emmett can be found running, drinking coffee, and dancing to reggaeton.

Jia-Hui Lee is a PhD student at MIT in the History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) program. Jia-Hui’s research focuses on scientific research in pest management in Tanzania, specifically on rodents.