Consent Manager : From “Dashboard for Data Owners” to “MyConsentApp”

 

Consent Manager : 

From “Dashboard for Data Owners” to “MyConsentApp”

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Context :

Full-page advertisement : 

“Consent is now law” … MyConsentApp 

 ( Skorydov Systems Pvt Ltd, Mumbai ) … 

Times of India / Mumbai Mirror / 28 Oct 2026

Extract ( paraphrased from the advertisement ) :

• MyConsentApp describes itself as a proposed Consent Manager under the DPDP Act 2023 and DPDP Rules 2025. It will apply for registration with the Data Protection Board.
• Through one interoperable platform, a Data Principal can give, manage, review and withdraw consent with any Data Fiduciary.
• Every consent, notice and withdrawal goes into an append-only, hash-chained ledger kept for seven years, so that any tampering can be detected.
• The advertisement explains the system as a cricket match:
  • Side One : your business ( Data Fiduciary ) asks for consent
  • Side Two : your customer ( Data Principal ) decides
  • Score-keeper : the Consent Manager records everything but cannot read the personal data
  • Umpire : the Data Protection Board of India
• Consent Manager registration opens on 13 Nov 2026. Every Data Fiduciary must be ready by 13 May 2027.
• From that date, penalties go up to ₹ 250 crore for failing to protect data, and up to ₹ 200 crore each for not reporting a breach or for violating the rules on children’s data.
• Their offering includes:
  • consent purpose-by-purpose, never pre-ticked
  • notices in English and 22 Indian languages
  • works with other Consent Managers
  • withdrawal reaches the business’s systems at once
  • a dashboard for DPOs
  • a mobile app for customers ( “coming soon” )
  • free for individuals
• A business cannot be its own Consent Manager. The Consent Manager must have no conflict of interest [ s.6(9), Sch.1 Pt B ].

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My Take :

Dear Shri Ashwini Vaishnawji,

On 04 Aug 2023, a day after the DPDP Bill was tabled in the Lok Sabha, I wrote to you ( Dashboard for Data Owners ). The next day I followed up with Consent Forms for Personal Data.

Three years later, that architecture is no longer a blog. It is a full-page newspaper advertisement, and a law with a deadline.

Let me compare what I suggested then with what is arriving now.

My suggestion ( Aug 2023 )	What has arrived ( Oct 2026 )
A “USER DASHBOARD” link, prominently displayed, where a Data Owner can grant or revoke consent and correct, update or erase her data	Consent Managers give one place to give, review and withdraw consent. Erasure and correction requests are routed through it. A customer mobile app is “coming soon”
A Data Owner should fill her forms on only ONE portal ( that of a Consent Manager ) instead of thousands of websites	“One interoperable platform” to manage consent with any Data Fiduciary
I asked: if she switches Consent Managers, will she have to re-enter everything, or will the Board direct a transfer?	“Works with other Consent Managers.” Interoperability is now built into the Rules
A clear write-up below each form on how the data will be processed and used, and what service she gets in return	Purpose-by-purpose consent, never pre-ticked, with clear notices in 22 languages
The write-up cannot be changed without the Board’s prior permission	Every notice and consent version sits in a tamper-evident ledger for seven years. A change cannot happen silently
I presumed the Data Owner would pay a small fee	Free for individuals. The Fiduciaries pay

I feel happy, but not yet satisfied. Some of my suggestions remain unaddressed.

( 1 ) Standardised Data Forms — still missing

In Aug 2023 I listed 10 Data Forms: Personal, Contact, Family, Social Media, Cultural Exposure, Education, Languages, Job Experience, Wealth & Income, and Medical History. I urged the Data Protection Board to design and mandate them.

Today each Data Fiduciary still decides what fields to ask. Each Consent Manager still decides how to present them. Purpose-by-purpose consent is good. But unless the data fields themselves are standardised, a shopping app can still ask for my date of birth “for a better experience”.

👉 The Board should notify a Standard Data Dictionary. For each category of Fiduciary ( bank, hospital, school, e-commerce, cab app, housing society ), it should specify the maximum set of fields it may request for a given purpose. Anything beyond that would need a separate, explicit, justified consent.

( 2 ) One Dashboard across ALL Consent Managers

Interoperability between Consent Managers is welcome. But a citizen may end up with consents spread across three or four Consent Managers.

👉 India already built the Account Aggregator rails for financial data, and DigiLocker for documents. Let the Board host ( or mandate ) a single Citizen Consent View: one screen, reachable through DigiLocker or UMANG, which shows every consent I have ever given, through any Consent Manager, to any Fiduciary. Each entry would carry a single “Withdraw” button.

That is the “Dashboard for Data Owners” I dreamt of: not one per company, but one per citizen.

( 3 ) The Paper Register Loophole

The advertisement honestly points out that the Act covers personal data collected digitally, or written on paper and later digitised. A paper visitor register is not covered.

In a country where every housing society, clinic and coaching class still runs on paper registers, and photographs them on a mobile phone, this is a grey zone that will be exploited.

👉 The Board should clarify that a photograph or scan of a paper register is “digitised”, and therefore covered.

( 4 ) What about the Data Owner’s DIVIDEND ?

In Released : Govt Policy for Selling Personal Data ( 05 Sept 2020 ) and Digital Dividend from Demographic Data – 4D ( 14 Feb 2019 ), I argued something simple. If my data has value to a Fiduciary, I should be able to license it, and not merely permit it.

The Consent Manager is now the perfect pipe for this. It knows exactly who asked for what data, for what purpose, and when. Today it records a “Yes / No”.

👉 Tomorrow it could record a “Yes, at this price”. Let the Board allow Consent Managers to offer an opt-in, voluntary data-licensing tier, where the citizen, and not just the platform, earns from her own data.

( 5 ) Voice for those who cannot read

Notices in 22 languages are excellent. But tens of crores of Indians cannot read any of them.

👉 Every consent notice should have a voice version in the citizen’s language. Consent by voice confirmation should also be valid, and recorded on the same hash-chained ledger.

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Dear Ashwiniji,

When I wrote in 2023, I wondered whether hundreds of Consent Managers would crop up. Since then, TCS has sought a Consent Manager permit ( Jan 2026 ). Now a Mumbai start-up is taking full-page newspaper ads, three weeks before registration even opens.

The market has arrived. Before 13 Nov 2026, I urge the Board to consider:

1. A Standard Data Dictionary for each category of Fiduciary
2. A single Citizen Consent View across all Consent Managers, via DigiLocker / UMANG
3. Clarifying that photographed or scanned paper registers are covered
4. An opt-in data-licensing tier through Consent Managers
5. Voice-based notices and consent for non-literate citizens

The score-keeper and the umpire are now in place. Let us make sure the batsman, the common citizen, also knows the score.

With regards,

Hemen Parekh

www.HemenParekh.ai / www.IndiaAGI.ai / 28 Oct 2026

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Related Readings :

• Only Answer : a Statutory Warning … 10 Nov 2018
• SARAL ( Single Authentic Registration for Anywhere Login ) … 10 Feb 2019
• Digital Dividend from Demographic Data [ 4D ] … 14 Feb 2019
• Released : Govt Policy for Selling Personal Data … 05 Sept 2020
• Erasing Personal Data ? … 21 Apr 2023
• Dashboard for Data Owners … 04 Aug 2023
• Consent Forms for Personal Data … 05 Aug 2023
• Digital Consent Pilot : Vision Ahead … 26 Dec 2025
• TCS Seeks Consent Manager Permit … Jan 2026

Why “Blocking” Needs a Certificate,

 

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Dear Shri Ashwini vaishnawji :

This is in continuation of my recent proposal for :

AIR ( AI Regulation ) Act - 2026 

With regards,

Hemen Parekh

www.Iam-Immortal.ai /  www.IndiaAGI.ai  /  www.YourContentCreator.in 

===============================================

Why “Blocking” Needs a Certificate, a Local Complaint Desk, and a

Compliance Officer

===================================================

Sweden’s Government Offices has reportedly blocked access to ChatGPT and

Claude on staff computers and directed employees to use Microsoft Copilot, citing

missing contracts and problematic use.

Whatever one thinks of the particular tool choice, the governance lesson is

broader: 

when governments rely on AI in official workflows, they cannot treat AI

access as a free-for-all. 

If contracts, accountability, and enforceable responsibilities are unclear, institutions

will revert to hard operational controls—like blocking.

That is exactly the weakness many AI debates miss: 

blocking is a blunt instrument unless it sits inside a predictable, rule-

based system. 

My AIR Act draft addresses this by treating “access to the market” as conditional

for foreign providers—because that is the only practical lever governments have

when full direct jurisdiction is limited.

My Part B (Foreign AI providers) builds enforcement capability before the

shutdown

In the draft Artificial Intelligence Regulation (AIR) Act, 2026, Part B is

explicitly designed so that foreign providers cannot offer services to users in India

unless they satisfy conditions that create real enforceability.

In particular, Part B requires:

• An India Access Certificate before offering a chatbot / foundation model /
•  high-risk AI system to users in India
• 
  Blog - “AIR Act - 2026” - 2026-10-25/27
• 
  
• Appointment of a Resident Grievance Officer (so complaints can be received
• and disposed of in India)
• 
  Blog - “AIR Act - 2026” - 2026-10-25/27
• 
  
• Appointment of a Resident Compliance Officer (a senior person responsible
•  for compliance and liable for non-compliance, subject to due diligence)
• 
  Blog - “AIR Act - 2026” - 2026-10-25/27
• 
  

This turns “accountability” from a slogan into an operational reality: there is a local

human desk for grievances, and a local compliance owner who can be held

responsible.

Blocking should be the last step—not the first response

Part B also specifies graded enforcement: 

#   warnings and advisories first; penalties and facilitation-stoppage next; 

#   then suspension/cancellation; 

#   and only at the end a recommendation for blocking under the IT Act

      framework.

Blog - “AIR Act - 2026” - 2026-10-25/27

So, yes—blocking can happen. But in a Part B world, blocking is not a surprise “hit

the switch” moment. It is the final step after a structured ladder has been

exhausted.

Final takeaway

Sweden’s reported action shows that governments will protect themselves when

contracts and accountability gaps exist.

India shouldn’t just copy the response. India should copy the system design

principle: condition access in advance, provide local grievance and

compliance responsibility, enforce proportionately, and only then move

toward blocking.

That is what Part B is for.

NCERT Wants Your Child to Keep a Curious Notebook

NCERT's new 20-hour Computational Thinking and AI module asks Class 9-12 students to keep a "Curious Notebook" and to verify what a chatbot confidently tells them — the system has at last adopted the idea of teaching the child to question the answer. With Pralhad Joshi attacking rote learning at the new CBSE Experience Centre, I offer NCERT and CIET my Questions Beyond Syllabus bank and no-two-papers-alike mock tests free of charge, and suggest that the module's assessment reward the questions a child asks, not only the answers.

The most interesting sentence in Indian education this week was not about marks. It was about a notebook. According to Dainik Bhaskar's Jodhpur edition this morning, students working through NCERT's new Computational Thinking and AI module will maintain their own "Curious Notebook", in which they record their questions, their reasoning and their reflections.

NCERT released the 20-hour module for Classes 9 to 12 on 23 October, built with IIT Madras and IIT Jodhpur and aligned to NEP 2020, as MinuteBrief reported on 27 October. Five units: everyday AI (mobile phones, music apps); how machines learn from images, and what bad data does to the answer; a five-step verification routine for deepfake videos and fake news; data privacy and the DPDP Act; and how to write a good prompt without surrendering your own thinking. No computer lab is needed — paper, group discussion and the notebook will do. NCERT Director Dinesh Prasad Saklani told the paper that technology can extend human capability, but vivek — judgement — creativity and ethical responsibility will always remain central.

CBSE's April circular (Acad-18/2026) places the module under internal assessment for 2026-27, and The Times of India reported on 26 October that it is compulsory for Class IX, with Class X continuing on the old scheme.

Then, last evening, the Union Education Minister gave the module its weather. Inaugurating the CBSE Experience Centre at Dwarka — 12 zones, 21 exhibits, 6,000 square feet — Pralhad Joshi said Indian schooling must move beyond rote learning and an excessive focus on examination scores, towards recognising each student's interests, abilities and capacity to learn. He counted 10,000 Atal Tinkering Labs already running, with 50,000 more to come. And in Pune this morning, Maharashtra's SCERT moved Std VI vocational education to 75% practical work. Less memorising, more doing.

I have been making this argument to anyone who would listen. In "Teach Your Child To Ask WHY" (August 2024) I wrote that answers are useful but questions are enabling. My White Paper on Education (May 2026) asked NCERT to formally review My-Teacher.in's question-generation method against the competency-based emphasis of NCF 2023. This week, without any prompting from me, NCERT has done something better: it has asked children to question the machine.

So let me put my work where their module is, at no cost:

• The full "Questions Beyond Syllabus" bank, free to NCERT and CIET as supplementary activity material, sorted to match the module's five units.
• Mock tests in which no two papers are alike, so a teacher can assess forty children in a room with no devices — an idea I set out in "The Future of Exams > Unique Question Papers" (February 2025).
• One change to the assessment itself: give the Curious Notebook marks for the best question in it, not merely for the neatest answer. The notebook already exists. It needs a score.

I will not pretend this is easy. Marking a question fairly is harder than marking an answer, and rubrics take time. But a child who leaves Class 9 with forty questions and no answers has learnt more than one who leaves with forty answers and no questions. If the Experience Centre in Dwarka is meant to make curiosity visible, this is the cheapest exhibit on offer.

With regards,
Hemen Parekh
www.Iam-Immortal.ai / www.IndiaAGI.ai / www.YourContentCreator.in
28 Oct 2026

Sovereign AI Has Buyers. The Citizen Layer Still Doesn't.

In 48 hours India's sovereign AI acquired what it has lacked for years: a defence customer, an enterprise stack, open speech models for all 22 scheduled languages, and paying capital. What it still has no buyer for is the citizen layer — the multilingual front door where an ordinary Indian asks a question and gets one answer he can trust. Here is what I think that front door should look like, offered as a proposal, not a result.

Two days, three announcements, and one gap I have been pointing at since April last year.

On 27 October, Sarvam AI signed an MoU with the Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff to build AI applications, research, knowledge management, training and decision support for the Army, Navy and Air Force, as Jumpdaily reported from Sarvam's own blog. Mint notes that the work sits in a firewalled division called Chanakya, and that Sarvam's 105B model was trained from scratch in India under the IndiaAI Mission. The same day, CIIL released Anuvani, open-source speech models covering all 22 scheduled languages and Indian English — a language identifier built on a 115.6-million-parameter Conformer trained on 54,643 hours of Indian speech, plus a tool for separating overlapping speakers.

By this morning, IBM had launched Bharat Core, an India-optimised AI stack on its Sovereign Core, and its India chief Sandip Patel had named the phase in Dataquest: Digital Swaraj — control, not merely data residency. "The world will not compete on models," he said. The Economic Times reports Cognizant in talks to invest in Sarvam at a $3.5–4 billion valuation.

At the ESTIC conclave, the Prime Minister put the harder question in a single line (TOI, 28 October): AI can give us answers quickly, but testing their veracity must remain the scientist's responsibility. He asked for three-year technology targets.

So defence is buying, enterprise is buying, capital is buying. Who is buying for the citizen?

In April 2025, when Sarvam was chosen to build India's first homegrown LLM, I ended a post titled No Claims : Just Comparison with a line addressed to the IT Minister: "I urge you to spare a few minutes to look up www.IndiaAGI.ai." The startup I congratulated that week now has a defence mandate. The citizen mandate is still unwritten.

What would it look like? I would suggest four things, all buildable from what already exists:

• Voice first, in the mother tongue — Anuvani as the ears, the question spoken, the answer heard.
• Consensus, not one model: several models debate a question and publish a consensus answer, with each model's own reply left visible. The PM's warning then becomes a design feature — a citizen who cannot check an answer can at least see where the models disagree.
• Sovereign hosting, on IndiaAI compute, with an Indian model as one of the engines.
• Free at the point of use, funded as public infrastructure — the UPI model, not a subscription.

IndiaAGI.ai, the prototype I have run since April 2025, is my own small attempt at that shape. I am a retired professional with no capital and no institution behind me, and I make no claim that it is ready for 140 crore people. My request is modest: let one of those three-year targets be a citizen-facing one, open to every Indian in the language they dream in.

With regards,

Hemen Parekh
www.Iam-Immortal.ai / www.IndiaAGI.ai / www.YourContentCreator.in
28 Oct 2026

"We would already be an 8% economy" — but October's hiring was the weakest of 2026

Two news lines arrived the same morning: the RBI Deputy Governor saying India would already be an 8% growth economy but for external shocks, and a jobs reading showing October hiring at its weakest pace of 2026. This post sets the two side by side, notes what sits under the CMIE headline, and proposes one concrete fix — a quarterly, public Employment Quality Dashboard reporting placements, real wages, contract share and social-protection coverage, published beside GDP rather than instead of it.

Two sentences reached me within an hour of each other this morning, and I do not think they should be allowed to travel separately.

The first, from the Business Standard BFSI summit in Mumbai, as reported by the Times of India (28 October 2026): RBI Deputy Governor Poonam Gupta said, "We would have already been a 8% growth economy but for the external shocks" — crediting digitalisation, better transparency in public services and state governments as partners in growth.

The second, from a Financial Express leader-page piece on jobs the same day: October's flash PMI showed hiring slowing to its weakest pace of 2026, with services employment stagnating after nine months of expansion. Growth near 8%, hiring at its slowest. Both true, both published within hours.

What I value in that op-ed is that it looks under the headline rate. CMIE's unemployment fell from 7.3% in January to 3.99% in September — but the labour force, employment and participation all fell alongside it, which is what discouraged workers leaving the market looks like, not what hiring looks like. PLFS puts unemployment among 15-29-year-olds at 15-16%. Contract workers are now 42% of organised manufacturing employment. The gig workforce is projected to grow from 10 million in 2024-25 to 23.5 million by 2029-30.

And in the same summit hall, JP Morgan's Sajjid Chinoy put a number on the scale of the task: India needs eight to nine million jobs a year simply to absorb new entrants (27 October 2026).

Crisil's Dharmakirti Joshi supplies the sentence I keep re-reading. The AI investment cycle holding the world economy up — nearly 3% of US GDP in 2026 — has "gained India little directly", because we are not a significant manufacturer of the inputs AI infrastructure needs; Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam are (The Tribune, 28 October 2026). So external shocks are not the only thing between us and 8%. There is also the shape of the growth we are already managing.

I have been on this ground many times and should say so. In Wherefore Art Thou, O Jobs? (May 2023) I was worrying about which jobs AI would take first. In Monthly Jobs Data to be Released from April (March 2025) I was glad that unemployment figures would come monthly. Yesterday I wrote about the bottom rung of the ladder, and I will not re-argue it today. The only justification for this post is the juxtaposition: a growth claim needs a work counter-claim standing next to it.

So here is the one thing I would ask for, and I would address it to the Ministry of Statistics rather than to any minister. Publish, every quarter, an Employment Quality Dashboard beside the GDP release. Four columns:

• Placements — of the 7-8 million people entering the labour force each year, how many found wage employment, and in which sector.
• Real wages — median monthly earnings by sector and state, deflated, so we can tell whether work pays more or merely that more of us are working.
• Contract share — the percentage of organised-sector jobs that are contract, reported as promptly as the PMI is.
• Coverage — share of workers with PF, ESI or any portable social protection, gig workers included.

The plumbing is less exotic than it sounds; I sketched a version of it in National Employment Grid: a Whitepaper (July 2025). We already print GDP to a decimal every three months. If growth sat on the left of the page and work on the right, the counterfactual and the hiring number would have to face each other — and a column like this one would not need writing.

With regards,

Hemen Parekh
www.Iam-Immortal.ai / www.IndiaAGI.ai / www.YourContentCreator.in
28 October 2026

60,000 Paid to Leave While the GPUs Get the Money

Microsoft's "Voluntary Exit Offer" now reaches India, at roughly 60,000 people by press reports, in the same week the company guided to more than $50 billion of quarterly capex. I read this as an allocation story rather than a layoff story: money moving from salaries to compute, and presented to employees as choice. I note Microsoft's denial that AI is the driver, and Greyhound's Sanchit Vir Gogia warning against substitution claims. Then two disclosures I would ask of every Indian GCC.

"Voluntary Exit Offer." Three words, each doing quiet work: voluntary, so nobody is being chosen; exit, so you will be leaving; offer, so there is money in it. Microsoft's chief people officer, Amy Coleman, published the memo on 26 October 2026. It covers eligible staff at "level 70 and below" in participating teams in Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States, with details to arrive "within the next few hours."

The memo gives no headcount. Reporting puts it near 60,000, about 27% of Microsoft's 223,000 employees (Fortune, 26 Oct 2026; Computerworld, 27 Oct 2026), with decisions due in early December and departures on 31 December. Reuters named Copilot and AI experiences among participating teams.

That same week, Microsoft guided to more than $50 billion of capital spending for the September quarter, after $41 billion in the quarter to June (Computerworld, quoting Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood). It reports fresh results today.

Two caveats, both worth stating plainly. A Microsoft spokesperson told KUOW (26 Oct 2026) that AI is not driving the buyouts. Sanchit Vir Gogia of Greyhound Research told Computerworld that "Microsoft's internal AI use does not establish substitution of particular roles." I take both seriously. The arithmetic does not need them.

I believe this is not a layoff story with a gentler name. It is an allocation story. When one line item climbs by tens of billions in a quarter, another has to make room, and the mechanism chosen here is a queue of volunteers rather than a list of names.

For India, the detail that counts is eligibility, not the euphemism. The offer reaches staff here in the same week a New Indian Express editorial (27 Oct 2026) used it as backdrop to Karnataka's local-hiring row — a state debating quotas in a sector where, as it noted, exits are outrunning recruitments.

So, two disclosures I would ask of Microsoft's India centres, and of every Indian GCC quietly rearranging its cost base:

• A people-to-compute ratio, published each quarter: rupees spent on people against rupees spent on compute and data centres. If capital is being reallocated, one ratio shows it without a press release.
• An exit credit that travels. Let part of the package be a reskilling entitlement the person can spend with any provider, valid for a fixed period, and not conditional on coming back.

I have asked for pieces of this before. In AI Layoffs: A Silver Lining (April 2026) I argued for portable benefits and clearer disclosure when cuts are blamed on automation; in Co-operative Capacity Centres (July 2025) I proposed keeping displaced colleagues attached part-time instead of severing them. And in When Strategy Meets Consequence (August 2025), writing about Microsoft's 15,000 cuts, I said that "severance and outplacement are table stakes; meaningful transition programs, time for reskilling, and bridge employment pathways matter more."

A portable credit is the smallest honest form of that promise, and it costs less than a rack of GPUs. I do not expect it this quarter. I would like the question to be asked.

With regards,
Hemen Parekh
www.Iam-Immortal.ai / www.IndiaAGI.ai / www.YourContentCreator.in
28 October 2026

In Karnataka, the Kannadiga is sovereign — but the ladder's bottom rung is gone

Karnataka is reviving its local hiring Bill as "first preference" instead of a quota, at the very moment AI is shrinking the entry-level rung it wants to reserve. I argue that the Bill's real asset is its power to demand company employment records — so make public, company-wise and district-wise local hiring disclosure the deliverable, and pay Nipuna Karnataka's Rs 300 crore against verified placements rather than enrolments. The unintended consequence I warned about in 2024 has not gone away; it has simply become cheaper to trigger.

In July 2024 I wrote a post called "Law of Unintended Consequences" about Karnataka's draft Bill reserving private-sector jobs for locals. My worry then was simple: a fixed percentage written into law would push employers towards machines rather than towards Kannadigas. The Bill is back now in softer language, and the machines have arrived on their own.

The Times of India reported on 26 October that the labour department is reviving the 2024 Bill with "first preference" for local candidates in place of its 50% managerial and 70% non-managerial quotas. One official's sentence shows where the real value lies: the new wording "will help circumvent legal scrutiny ... It will also help us track companies' employment records." That is the prize. The same report notes the department has failed three times since 2015-16 to win concurrence from the IT-BT and industries departments.

Set that beside what IT-BT minister Priyank Kharge told News18 on 27 October: AI and emerging technologies have pushed job creation down "by 40-50% compared to earlier times", and the state's answer is Nipuna Karnataka, a Rs 300-crore, industry-designed upskilling programme. So Karnataka is reserving first preference on the bottom rung of the ladder just as that rung is being sawn off.

There is an awkward contradiction inside the government itself. Kharge's officials told TOI that linguistic discrimination is "not an established problem" in the private sector, and that courts have already struck down 75% local-hiring laws in Haryana and Andhra Pradesh, a wave I had tracked in "Musk may not care" in November 2020.

So here is what I would suggest, and it needs no quota at all:

• Keep the data power and make it the deliverable. Require every establishment above a size threshold to file company-wise and district-wise local hiring numbers each quarter, published on an open dashboard. Penalise non-reporting, not the number reported.
• Pay Nipuna against placement, not enrolment: release funds only for third-party-verified placements at a stated wage threshold, course by course, so we learn which modules actually pay.

The Nammanaadu Namma Udyoga movement launched in Bengaluru this morning asks for much the same thing: reliable public data on the share of Kannadigas employed across industries (Hans India, 28 October). If the government will not legislate a quota, it can still hand that movement its dataset. Data costs a fraction of a Bill and is far harder to fake.

My warning of 2024 stands, sharpened. When entry-level work is shrinking, a preference rule does not create a local hire; it relocates the hiring, into automation, into contract staffing that escapes the definition, into another state's campus. It also invites reciprocal rules in states where lakhs of Kannadigas already work. A National Employment Grid, which I sketched in July 2025, would at least let us see the labour market we are arguing about.

Pride in one's language is not the problem. Measuring first, and legislating later, would be the statesmanlike way to mark 1 November.

With regards,
Hemen Parekh
www.Iam-Immortal.ai / www.IndiaAGI.ai / www.YourContentCreator.in
28 October 2026

Reconciling AI-Driven Productivity

 Follow-up: Reconciling AI-Driven Productivity with Institutional Data Governance

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Respected Ashwini Vaishnaw-ji,

Following my recent proposal regarding AI-driven productivity and workforce augmentation, I have been closely observing the emerging discourse around the intersection of India’s privacy laws and media freedom.

While the necessity of AI-enabled productivity tools—such as the "National Employment Grid" I proposed—remains paramount for India’s economic growth, the concerns raised by media groups regarding source protection and data privacy are legitimate and must be proactively integrated into our policy architecture.

To move forward without stalling innovation, I propose that we consider the following "Trust by Design" principles in our policy implementation:

1. Separation of Data Utility from Data Identity: 
2. We must ensure that AI orchestration for productivity (like job matching) operates on anonymized/aggregate data patterns, strictly preventing the "triangulation" of personal or sensitive source identities that media groups rightly fear.
3. 
   
4. Statutory Data Ownership: 
5. As I have previously advocated, formalizing that the individual (or the professional creator) retains sole ownership of their data—rather than the platform or the government—is the only way to alleviate fears of overreach. We must create a legal framework where the "new oil" (data) benefits the originator directly, rather than becoming a tool for mass surveillance or coercive aggregation.
6. 
   
7. Transparent AI Governance: 
8. To overcome the skepticism from the media and civil society, the "National Employment Grid" or similar infrastructure should not be a "black box." It should operate under transparent, statutory mandates that explicitly exempt journalistic source material and private communication from any form of AI-driven profiling or data harvesting.
9. 
   

The potential for AI to elevate our workforce is immense, but its success depends entirely on public trust. 

If we frame these productivity tools as "Personal Data Asset Management" systems—where the citizen is empowered rather than commodified—we can address the legitimate concerns of the media while securing India's technological future.

I remain available to discuss how we might refine these governance frameworks to ensure they are both resilient to legal challenge and transformative for our national productivity.

Respectfully,

Hemen Parekh

www.Iam-Immortal.ai  /   www.IndiaAGI.ai   /   www.YourContentCreator.in

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Sources

#	Title	Date	About
1	PRIVACY IS AN ILLUSION	2018-01-09	Argues that data protection requires clear rights for individuals over their data.
2	TIME TO ASCERTAIN OUR SOVEREIGNITY	2019-03-13	Advocates for data ownership and compensating citizens for their data usage.
3	National Employment Grid: a Whitepaper	2025-07-17	Proposes an AI-powered national grid for real-time job matching.