Systems co-operatives for India

While India continues to suffer from death from malnutrition, with almost 9 hundred thousand deaths in 2018, it is with deep despair that one notes that Indian farmers are throwing away produce during the COVID-19 related lock-down.

The government is fully culpable for these and other deaths due to the hasty imposition of the lock-down. But it is time for each one of us to take steps to build support systems that ensure that India becomes a developed country, where poverty and malnutrition are a thing of the past and we can truly establish the country that every school child pledges to form everyday.

If engineers, marketers, financial experts, artists and lawyers can get together to build the following, it will help steer us in that direction:

1. Information dissemination
1. For better or for worse, WhatsApp is the medium of communication within a section of the populace. We need engineers to work with WhatsApp to clearly mark "certified" stories, whose authorship is fully traceable.
2. Censorship of any identified author must be impossible. This will ensure that Twitter-like suspension of accounts that express unpopular opinions does not take place.
2. Task-oriented networking
1. How can we connect a farmer throwing away produce to the migrant laborer who needs food while he is walking from the city to the village.
2. We need a social network that enables task oriented connections.
3. Foreign exchange monitor
1. I feel physical pain as I write this but with the foreign exchange that Nirav Modi / Mehul Chokshi stole from India, India could have bought 200,000 ventilators. That is 5 times the current number of ventilators in India.
2. Investor visa attorneys - every developed country in the world allows permanent residency based on investment. This is a legal way to do money laundering that enables transfer of wealth from developing countries to developed countries. Neo-colonialism is alive and well. We need lawyers in every developed country to trace the beneficiaries of such visas and ensure that developing countries' precious foreign exchange is not drained illegally.

For all of the above, we need public activists, communications experts, project managers, etc. who can move these "systems co-operatives" forward. The Amul approach is worth emulating in other systems. If there are such activities already going on, I will be joining them. If there aren't, I pledge to start and support them with time and money. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter.