Mitigating Air Pollution in the Anthropocene: A Perspective from India

In the early 2000s, the improved cookstove (ICS) is a technical device emerged as an important response to mitigating air pollution from inefficient biofuel burning in India. ICS can be broadly defined as modified stoves that aim to burn biofuel more efficiently, emit less smoke, and consume less biofuel. ICS research dates back to the 1930s, mainly as a response to pressures on forest resources. By the 1990s, the ICS fell into oblivion as most ICS programs had failed. There was also a shift in development discourse to household electrification. However, by the early 2000s, there was a renewed interest in ICS technologies. How are we to understand the reappearance of the ICS? This seminar will present an ethnographic narrative that allows for an assessment of how the cookstove is improved and is seminal in the production of either a polluted environment or a mitigated environment, in how air pollution and its consequences are understood and transformed.