The House Near the Snooker Club

What 100+ doorsteps in Lahore taught me about solar, gender, and the limits of a survey form. A guest post by Nimra Aamir Ali.

During my time as an intern at the Centre for Water Informatics and Technology (WIT), LUMS, in collaboration with Open Energy Transition, I was given the research lead for the survey design and data collection on rooftop solar in Lahore: who is installing panels, who is not, and why. As an anthropology major at LUMS I had done a lot of meaningful research projects, a social media and body-image study, a study of gendered language in biomedical writing, an ethnography of gendered safety in a public library, a data-pipeline project for public health records at clinics, an ethnography of elite housewives, but this one was different. It was not just about people or culture, it was technical: net metering, load-shedding, bills, financing, trust in installers, solar panels, none of it in my comfort zone. I was also leading it myself this time, not part of the group. Across those three months I designed the form, refined it, and took it to more than 100 households, but this is not really about the numbers. It is about what it took to get them.

There was no dataset to start with, just a form that did not exist yet, and my own wrong assumption that the hard part would be the fieldwork, not the questions. Every question turned into a small argument with myself about what a "normal household" even looks like. Over 92% of my respondents' "primary household decision-makers" were male. Three women. Four who preferred not to say. No one tells you what it is like to watch your own hypothesis about gendered power confirm itself, door after door, in your own city. My own positionality matters here too, a woman, a student at an elite university, a mother, doing fieldwork in neighbourhoods that were not mine to begin with, so this happened around school pickups, around whatever small crisis the day decided to throw at me. All 83 questions, but no column for the version of me doing the asking.

Not all of it was doorsteps, either. Somewhere in the middle of those three months I went to a solar expo to understand the supplier side: installers, distributors, the industry, and the people my respondents were deciding whether to trust. I walked in and it was, with no subtlety at all, a room built for men. Men behind every booth, men in the aisles, doing business and networking with each other. Starting a conversation there felt nothing like knocking on a door. At a household door I was asking someone else to be vulnerable; here I felt exposed before I had even said salam. A pit in my stomach at every booth, every time, no matter how many I had already done that day. What kept me going was reminding myself, mid-conversation, of my own positionality, that the discomfort itself was data. If I felt I did not belong asking about solar, that said something about who this market was built to talk to.

A questionnaire treats a household like a set of checkboxes. Anthropology kept pulling me back to the person across from me, deciding in real time how much of their actual life to hand over. A ten-minute survey turned into an unstructured 40-minute conversation.