Challenging the status quo

Modern world needs modern solutions. A corrupt world needs anti-corruption as much as a scalp needing a shampoo. 

While reading American and British history from 1800-1947, what I could understand is that India in 2026 is having most of those challenges which took others half a century to solve. For e.g., governments working on bribe to give contracts and large organisations encouraging it to stay in business. Government servants short selling the stocks of corporates which they would first approve and allow to grow multi-fold and then revoking approvals/licenses or proving issues and then short selling the stocks in market. Gold standard removed so governments can sell bonds which is a future promise and remove pegging on a real asset which allows them to keep adding more currency without any reserves of a real hard asset. 

The wages are low when a new industry starts and then it grows as expertise grows and needs employees with higher skills. Later they bring automation and make employees redundant and replaceable who now can’t step back from a certain lifestyle the develop over a period of time and then end up doing any job for upkeep rather than self-growth and realisation. 

Tighten cash availability to invest and promote more loans which keep the citizens tied and slog until they die or sometimes even pass on the debt or debt mindset to next generation. As a country grow, the wage there grows to a state which is optimum and beyond that it can’t go as it kills the cycle. Child labour saved lives of kids who would have died of hunger otherwise at some point of time. Child marriages would have kept generations survive without extinction at another point of time. Industrial Revolution gave job to a large women population who didn’t have an income to sustain life of their family as often husbands were poor and often drunk and useless for families. All these were relevant at some point in past.

Today most of it might be a problem in India as we are still a century behind when it comes to handling civic challenges and public issues. Our governments focused on keeping the country poor by only supplying food and clothes and maybe shelter while rest of the world focussed on equipping the citizens with education and skill which can then earn them a respectful living without waiting for government freebies. I don’t intend to ridicule the system, we do have a well-structured system which can benefit the general public, but the last leg of execution is so well blocked by corruption and self-centered officials and politicians. Even though everyone would have written few pages of essays against corruption, when it comes to living our life, we are the ones who entertain and encourage it.

We have tried everything yet when it comes to making the system work, we tried complaining, we tried paying the bribes, we tried hacking the system, we tried playing dumb and much more. With the potential super weapon in AI with us, it’s time to use the power of social media. It’s time to build something radical, by that I mean something never tried before and at the same time being as simple as creating a civic point system for citizens which can be traded for much more than we could imagine while living in the country. The civic points can be achieved by choosing to react on the corrupt and broken system over social media handles which gets stored to AI based systems which investigates with minimum human in loop. For e.g., a video of corrupt politician or government servant is received, the system looks up for various factors and scores the issue. With multiple evidence and data, system forces the government to take action, all the while giving civic points to the complainant, at the same time reducing civic points for the corrupt participants. This could be as simple as a criminal case on a citizen which affects his civic score once proven guilty. Or a signal cutting video which shows the citizen and the vehicle owner details which automatically cuts a ticket and also cuts their score in parallel.

Aadhaar could be considered as the unique identifier of everything, and this would make the people more vigilant in handling their life without being civic. As in the case of CIBIL score, this system would affect positively or negatively their entire life. Even while leaving the country, the data doesn’t get reset and will be available perpetually. The data should not be transparent to citizens or handled by humans but only AI having access to it. This comes with its own risks, but that risk is much better than not even worrying about a better world. A key element should be how the negative points also get added to future generations of the offender. This could be a game changer considering the psyche of India which is all the while working for future generations than themselves. There is no undoing of the points, and no action can gain a point to increase it. There are only negative points available to be taken and once taken it’s theirs forever.

If the civic score looks more dystopian, then we could even ignore having a civic score but just focus on having social media handles which publicise the corrupt officials and share the information with their family too tagging them officially. This is the only other way a corrupt leader or officer could care as they are in the race to make it big for their family and for them alone. If the pride is impacted publicly, that is something which would make people think twice. There are always a not so happy side to it but considering the deeper state of affairs in the country few false negatives could be tolerated, and a change is inevitable with more publicly available information democratised enough to challenge the rots in the system.

A change is much warranted, and an Internet linked, social media driven, AI led change is the only way forward. We need to consciously stop normalising corruption and challenge it at every attempt. 

“A revolution without a prior reformation of values and beliefs would collapse or become a tyranny.”  - Saul Alinsky