Vigilant India, Prosperous India: My Roadmap

Vigilance refers to a state of being careful about potential difficulties or dangers. Well, that is one among many qualities we should have in order to be prosperous. That being said prosperity itself is very subjective. The needs and aspirations of human beings change from one person to other. Yuval Noah Harari in his book ‘Sapiens’ points out that the entire achievements we have had as a species are because of our ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. There are other species that can cooperate in large numbers such as bees or ants. But they do so in a rigid manner. So the point is for us humans, the prosperity of the community we live in is as important as ours. One major hurdle in the path of prosperity of a community or a country for that matter is to form a consensus on what it means to be prosperous.

In order to come up with a roadmap for a prosperous nation it is very important to identify the problems that we are most likely to face along the way. According to Harari’s another book ‘Homo Deus’ the three major problems the world is facing currently are – nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption. When we come closer home and look at our country nuclear war does not seem like a possibility at least in the near future. Yes, climate change is going to affect us but the immediate concern that we will face, partly because of climate change is that of water scarcity. But the most important problem is that of technological disruption which most of us fail to even acknowledge. And this impact of technology can be on all spheres of our life. The third major roadblock which we see in our country is the rising communal disharmony. I would argue that technology has a huge role to play in this.

Let us first look into the water crisis India is facing today. The country is running out of drinking water. The fate of agriculture in such a scenario is even worse. It should be noted that agriculture is the primary livelihood for nearly 50% of our population. It is worthwhile to ponder on how we reached here. Green revolution accompanied with the bore well revolution is considered as one of the major reasons for groundwater scarcity. Decreasing vegetation cover due increase in deforestation, and climate change leading to more rain in short spans causing excessive runoff is also another reason. Given such hard times, water equity is also another concern. Like all other times, the rich and the powerful manages to survive, leaving behind the poor to suffer. Poor in India accounts for 80% of the population. We cannot afford to let the poor suffer. So what needs to be done? Agriculture practices that use water efficiently should be encouraged. Shift to producing less water-intensive crops can be another solution. Above all institutional mechanisms should be put in place to ensure water equity.

So now let us address the elephant in the room – technological disruption. When we hear the word technological disruption we often think about AI and robots who are more intelligent than humans taking over the world. But that seems highly unlikely. It is foreseen by the experts that development in AI will create a volatile job market. Which implies that present jobs will become obsolete making way for new jobs in a very short span of 5 or 10 years. So one major concern is whether people will have the mental resilience to upskill themselves every 5 or 10 years to fit into the job market. The bigger question for India is whether we will be able to provide the necessary training for people. We have not yet succeeded in providing basic education to a large section of our society. Given our demographic, it would be a humongous task. We as of today can’t predict the job market of the next 10 years and plan education for the kids today. But what we can do is to train them to face these situations of uncertainty. Mental resilience should be something the educational system aim to impart. Apart from these India also have the possibility of being among the first countries where many of the AI experiments can take place (for e.g. automated vehicles). We should also be vigilant about these and push for policy regulations.

Now that was what technology could do in the next 5 years or so. But there is something that technology is already doing to us. It is thriving on our attention. ‘The Social Dilemma’ a documentary on Netflix brings out this point very succinctly. Tristan Harris co-founder of ‘Centre for Humane Technology’ mentions in the film that we always think of a point when technology undermines human intelligence but technology has already overwhelmed human weaknesses. Social media is doing that that very efficiently which is referred to as the ‘race to the bottom of the brain stem’. We assume that social media gives us information but it actually gives us affirmation. They do this because it is the most effective way to keep us staring at our screen. The more the time we spent on screen the more the advertisers pay. So it is a business model, which do not necessarily care about whether that is good for people. The result is a more polarised society where people with different opinions find it harder and harder to discuss and debate. This is one of the major factors to the communal divide we see in India. Social media is seen to manipulate elections, increase depression, increase suicides among teen girls and undermine democracy. It does so by keeping track of our activities and the data we provide them. Data is the new currency. Should we introduce data tax on the companies that collect data? This is something to be discussed and debated.

This is not an essay aimed at bashing technology. Technology has made possible a lot of amazing things. The idea was to take cognisance of the flipside of technology is as well. The peculiar thing about our current state of affairs is best captured in Edward O Wilson’s words: “We have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god like technology”. So what do we do? We need better institutions. We need regulations which can in a way manoeuvre technology into something that will benefit humanity. Well there are already examples where technology was fool proofed for the communities good. One such case is that of Taiwan where the digital minister Audrey Tang was very instrumental in bringing out ‘.g0v movement’ through which Taiwan aims to achieve better transparency in governance. Technology could be used for better healthcare, improving the service delivery, improving education, improving transparency etc. Let us not let it ruin our attention span, affect our relationships and divide us. So the two key aspects of my road map will be to ensure sufficient water for India and using technology to upgrade our lives.