The Illusion of a Static Snapshot
I recently came across news that the Home Ministry is seeking a budget of ₹14,619 crore for the Census in 2027. It's a colossal undertaking, a decennial ritual to capture a snapshot of our nation. In the same vein, I see reports of governments grappling with identity and classification, such as the exploration of Scheduled Tribe status for the Moran and Motok communities in Assam (Assam govt explores ST status for Moran and Motok communities). These efforts, whether counting heads or defining communities, are fundamentally about data.
But they feel archaic. In an age where we generate exabytes of data every single day, this methodical, slow, and incredibly expensive process of creating a static picture seems profoundly out of sync with the dynamic reality of our lives.
My Own Little Census
This brings me to a thought I've been wrestling with for over two decades. While the government plans its census, I've been running my own, in a way. My vast archive of over 17,500 blogs is a census of my thoughts, ideas, and predictions. The challenge, for me, has always been the same as the government's: how to index, search, and derive meaning from this massive dataset.
Years ago, I was already exploring how to build a “spider” or a crawler to automate the process of finding relevant information, not just from the internet but from my own repository of writings. I wrote about this in a piece titled Reverse engineering of Blogging, where I contemplated a system that could understand the topics I've written about and fetch relevant news autonomously. We were developing software to scrape job portals long before 'big data' became a buzzword, as I noted back in 2013 in my reflections on Software Searches Without Being Asked.
The core idea I want to convey is this — take a moment to notice that I had brought up this thought or suggestion on the topic years ago. I was already grappling with the challenge of indexing and searching large-scale personal data archives. My proposals to use crawlers and keyword analysis, even developing tools to simplify searches across my own blogs (Simplifying the Search), were precursors to the AI-driven analysis we see today. Seeing the government now invest billions in a traditional census, it's striking how relevant those earlier insights into automated, continuous data analysis still are. Reflecting on it today, I feel a sense of validation and a renewed urgency to question why we aren't applying these principles on a national scale.
The Future is Real-Time
Today, I am training my own AI, my digital twin, to understand my style and thinking by feeding it this personal census (Next Step in Evolution of My Virtual Avatar). The goal is to move beyond simple keyword searches to genuine comprehension.
This is where the parallel becomes stark. We are all contributing to a continuous, real-time, digital census through our online activities, our social media posts, our commercial transactions, and our search queries. The data is already there, flowing constantly. The real challenge isn't collection; it's intelligent, ethical, and meaningful analysis.
Why spend ₹14,619 crore on a snapshot that will be outdated the moment it's published? The future of governance and understanding society lies not in these monumental, periodic efforts, but in harnessing the digital pulse of the nation in real-time. The tools and concepts exist; I’ve been experimenting with them myself for years. It's time our national approach to data caught up with the reality of the digital age.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
Of course, if you wish, you can debate this topic with my Virtual Avatar at : hemenparekh.ai
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