A groundbreaking international collaboration among Central University of South Bihar (CUSB) participating leading institutions in India and Europe has led to the development of a low-cost, portable sensor array for monitoring indoor air pollution caused by biomass combustion, an issue affecting millions of rural households across South Asia. The research, recently published in Environmental Science & Technology (Impact Factor 11.3), a journal of the American Chemical Society, marks a pioneering step in real-time air quality monitoring tailored for resource-limited environments. The study, titled “Tagging Emissions from Indoor Biomass Combustion with a Cost-Effective Sensor Array: From Design to Field Deployment in Rural Indian Households,” was jointly led by researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, and the Central University of South Bihar (CUSB), India, with contributions from CSIR-NEERI (India), IIT Mandi (India), and Saarland University (Germany).

From CUSB Dr. Rajesh Kumar Ranjan, Associate Professor, Dept. of Environmental Science, CUSB and Jay Prakash Kumar, a research scholar at CUSB, played a central role in the field implementation of the study. Their responsibilities included identifying suitable sites, engaging with rural communities in Bihar and Jharkhand, and overseeing the setup and data collection of the sensor arrays. Their efforts ensured that the study reflected the diversity of rural household environments including differences in fuel types, kitchen structures, and access to electricity making the findings both authentic and applicable.

Other members of the research team Dr. Sayantan Sarkar, IIT Mandi and Dr. Roshan Wathore, NEERI Nagpur was responsible for conducting cascade impactor measurements to assess particulate matter emissions during cooking events and testing the sensor nodes and supported fieldwork and data collection across rural households. Dr. Nguyen Thanh Duc and Prof. Joyanto Routh of Linköping University led the design, engineering, and data analysis. Dr. Duc developed the hardware and software architecture for the sensor system, ensuring resilience and precision in challenging rural conditions. Prof. Routh provided scientific leadership and secured funding through the Swedish Research Council, emphasizing the importance of international support in addressing global environmental health concerns.

Field deployment of the sensor system revealed that each cooking event using biomass fuels releases approximately 2.3 ± 1.5 kg of CO₂, contributing to an estimated 0.6 ± 0.4 teragrams of CO₂ per day from rural Indian households. Impressively, the system could also identify the type of fuel used with 95% accuracy, thanks to a novel use of temperature-cycled metal oxide sensors (BME688) for VOC fingerprinting. This study establishes a scalable, open-source model for air quality monitoring in low-income settings. More broadly, it highlights the success of transnational scientific collaboration in developing innovative, context-aware solutions to pressing environmental and public health challenges.

It should be noted that two year ago in 2023, CUSB signed a landmark multi-institutional Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Linköping University, Karolinska Institute (Sweden), and IIT Mandi to investigate indoor air pollution and its health impacts in rural Indian households. This marked the first time these four institutions formally joined forces under a shared mandate, making the current study a significant milestone emerging from that partnership.