Mr. Dharmaraj Solanki will present his MDP presentation as per the details below:

Date: 16th July 2026 (Thursday)
 

Time: 1200 – 1300 hrs.
 

Venue: C-TARA Conference Room No. 1

Title: Platforms, People, and Participation: Profiling Citizen Scientists in India

Supervisor: Prof. Pankaj Sekhsaria

Examiner: Prof. Anand B. Rao

Abstract:

Citizen science in India has grown rapidly across domains, including biodiversity monitoring, phenology, air quality, civic-environmental action, and natural resource governance. Yet the people at the centre of this growth - the citizen scientists themselves - have rarely been studied as a population in their own right: who they are, what they actually do, how they describe themselves, what tools they use, what motivates them, how they evolve, and what happens to the knowledge they generate. This report addresses that gap through a profiling exercise: nine direct interviews and one proxy-mediated historical account, structured across seven analytical dimensions, producing a multi-dimensional comparative portrait of citizen scientists across Indian environmental initiatives.

The profiling reveals five cross-cutting patterns. Participants consistently decline to describe themselves as scientists, preferring identities grounded in practice, community, or cause - a pattern that holds across biodiversity monitoring, phenology, urban civic action, community governance, and commercial ESG platforms. A gap exists between the labels institutions assign to participants and the labels participants use for themselves, taking two mechanistically distinct forms: an unnoticed divergence, where the institution appears unaware that participants do not share its framing, and a managed substitution, where institutions consciously choose non-scientific labels for motivational reasons. Feedback loops between citizen contribution and institutional consequence are consistently missing in platform-mediated cases, while community-governance-embedded cases show the opposite. The conditions under which citizen-generated data reaches institutional outcomes differ markedly between Indian cases and six international comparators, with two translation mechanisms - relational embedding and commercial incentive alignment - documented here for the first time from Indian fieldwork. Finally, two participants demonstrate a passion-to-purpose trajectory from initial participation into institutional roles, suggesting that citizen science can, under particular programme conditions, function as an incubator of civic leadership.

Read through a development practice lens, these findings suggest that citizen science programmes in India are, in the main, productive in data terms but impoverished in participant terms: citizens contribute substantially without understanding what their contribution produces, and without programmes understanding how citizens understand themselves. Citizen science has often been evaluated through the quality of the data it produces. This study suggests it should also be understood through the people it produces - and through the meanings those people attach to participation itself.

Keywords: citizen science; environmental governance; participant identity; self-description; coordinator/self-framing gap; motivation; platform design; feedback loops; translation mechanisms; development practice; India; biodiversity monitoring; civic technology; community governance.