How AI can help tap the wealth
India is poor.
That is the story the world tells.
By conventional measures:
- Per capita income
- Infrastructure deficit
- Human development indices
It is not entirely wrong.
But there is another story.
A truer story.
One that conventional measures cannot see, because they are looking in the wrong places.
At the same time, India is a rich country too.
Rich in a currency that:
- Does not appear on any balance sheet
- No GDP calculator captures
- That no foreign investor has yet figured out how to value
That currency is the unheard, unevaluated, untapped intelligence of 1.4 billion citizens.
Millions of Indians carry, in their daily lived experience, solutions to the very problems that are keeping India poor.
We are, in the most literal sense, the richest poor country in the world.
And we have been walking past our own gold mine for 78 years.
The river that nobody drinks from
India is not short of ideas.
It is short of pipelines.
Every day, ideas flow:
- In chai shops in Coimbatore
- In WhatsApp groups in Warangal.
- In Opinion columns in the media and on social media. Like this one.
- And in the minds of lots of people who don’t know where to tell.
Rich, specific, field-tested ideas born not from theory but from lived experience.
They flow, and then they vanish.
Or remain bottled up.
There is no net to catch them.
No system to evaluate them.
No pipeline to carry the best of them to the decision makers who need them most.
We have built the world’s largest democracy.
But forgot to build democracy’s most essential infrastructure:
- The mechanism by which the governed can meaningfully inform the governors.
This is not a small oversight.
It may be the most expensive oversight in India’s post-independence history.
Lower-hanging fruit than R&D
We celebrate R&D. We should.
But R&D is expensive, slow, and uncertain.
A rupee invested in R&D may take a decade or two to yield a harvest, if at all.
Don’t get me wrong. I have written many articles on the dire need for R&D.
This article is about something more potential than R&D.
Citizen intelligence.
It is different.
It is often pre-validated by ground reality.
It emerges from people who have:
- Observed the problem
- Intuited a solution
- It may be implemented informally at a small scale.
It requires not invention but recognition.
Not a laboratory but a listener.
I agree that many may be trivial or unimplementable, among them.
But there are plenty of gems of ideas that have the potential to transform India.
Consider what that means at the national scale.
If even one in a thousand or even a lakh of citizens carries one actionable policy insight…
And that is a conservative estimate…
We are sitting on over a million such insights at any given moment.
Insights about agriculture, energy, health, education, urban planning, water management, skilling, logistics, taxation, and a hundred other domains where ground-level observation produces conclusions no ministry committee ever could.
The challenge was always in the collection, evaluation, and synthesis.
Until now, that challenge was difficult to surmount.
It no longer is.
The bureaucratic immune system
There is a particular pathology in how institutions handle unsolicited inputs from outside.
India’s bureaucracy is not unique in suffering from it, though it probably suffers more acutely.
When something arrives from outside the system:
- The evaluative instinct is almost always to find the hole
- Not to ask: what is good in this?
- But to ask: where does this fail?
The first objection becomes the basis for rejection.
This is not malice. It is institutional self-preservation.
The bureaucratic immune system treats citizen suggestions as foreign bodies and mounts a rejection response.
The result is that India’s decision-making apparatus is running on a tiny fraction of the intellectual fuel available to it.
It is a supercomputer that has most of its processors.
And the gold mine keeps sitting there, untouched, while we solely depend on bureaucracy, orimport solutions from countries that have far less raw material to work with.
3-stage pipeline
To be fair to the government, they have created many citizen participation platforms.
But that is not enough.
The goal should be to produce an implementable policy based on these inputs.
And that requires 2 further stages that are:
- More demanding
- More valuable.
Where real innovation lies
Stage 1: Collection without prejudice
Any citizen can submit an input, structured or unstructured, in any Indian language, however tentative or incomplete.
The AI frontend, well before any human intervention, does not judge the format.
A retired schoolteacher in Rajasthan and a software engineer in Bengaluru should face identical entry barriers: None.
The system reads for substance, not sophistication of expression or completeness.
It should only see if there’s anything good and substantive in it, worth considering.
Stage 2: Integration
This is where the architecture becomes genuinely original.
And where the real wealth of the gold mine is found.
A single citizen’s suggestions may be a workable solution to a major problem.
Or the suggestions of multiple citizens together may provide a solution.
The AI integration layer does what no human committee has the bandwidth to do. It reads across thousands of submissions simultaneously, identifies thematic and structural overlaps, if any, recognises where one citizen’s observation addresses another citizen’s problem, and synthesises composite proposals that are:
- More complete
- More implementable
- More robust than any individual input
The output is not just a collection of citizen submissions.
It is a portfolio of integrated policy proposals, each one assembled from the distributed intelligence of multiple contributors who may never have known each other existed.
Aggregating multiple citizen insights may sometimes produce proposals more viable than any single contribution.
India would be the first democracy to institutionalise this on a national scale.
Stage 3: Fallback protection
Here lies a design principle that is easy to overlook but critical to get right.
When integrated proposals are submitted for ministerial evaluation, some will succeed, and some will fail.
The failure of a composite proposal must never bury any individual insights that fed into it, if the insights were found good, prima facie.
Each constituent contribution must be tagged, preserved, and kept alive in the system independently of the fate of any composite proposal it contributed to.
A farmer’s water management observation that fed into a failed integrated proposal today may be the missing piece of a different integrated proposal tomorrow.
An engineer’s partial solution that was subsumed into a rejected composite proposal may stand on its own merits in a different domain context later.
The system must be architected so that rejection at the integration stage triggers re-evaluation of constituent inputs, not their disposal.
This is not a minor technical detail.
It is what separates a genuine pipeline from a more sophisticated version of the suggestion box, which is another phrase for a more sophisticated dead end.
This is not a favour to citizens
Let us be clear about something that the current governance culture gets exactly backwards.
When a citizen offers a well-reasoned contribution to governance, the government is not doing that citizen a favour by considering it.
The citizen is doing the government a favour by offering it.
Contributions that:
- Emerge from lived experience
- Incubated over years of observation
- Carrying the implicit validation of ground-level reality, these are gifts to the state.
A government that treats them as petitions for favour to be processed has fundamentally misunderstood its own interests.
Citizens’ ideas, as the Fifth Pillar of Democracy
Citizens are not supplicants.
They are important resource persons.
Their ideas are important resources.
The unannounced Fifth Pillar of Democracy.
They include the highest-quality ideas the government could not have come up with, because no ministry official, however brilliant, has:
- Observed ten thousand farms
- Ten thousand classrooms
- Ten thousand rural kitchens at the field level, the way the people who live in them have.
Successful integrated proposals must credit their contributors publicly:
- Not as a courtesy, but genuinely and as a strategy
- It tells the others:
- The system works
- Your contribution matters
- Submit your next one
- Recognition is the fuel that keeps the pipeline flowing
- Without it, the gold mine dries up
What needs to be built
The technology exists today.
Large language models (LLMs) can:
- Read unstructured submissions in any Indian language
- Classify them by domain
- Assess internal value and consistency
- Cross-reference existing schemes
- Identify overlaps across thousands of submissions
- Produce structured briefs at essentially zero marginal cost per input processed.
What does not yet exist is the institutional architecture to make it work.
A dedicated cross-ministerial evaluation cell is essential, staffed not by generalist administrators but by domain specialists with a mandate to find what’s right rather than what’s wrong.
So is a feedback system that tells contributors what happened to their submission and why.
Call it Jan Vichar, call it Idea Bank Of India, call it what you will.
Taiwan’s vTaiwan platform and Estonia’s participatory governance infrastructure are similar.
But precedents India can decisively surpass, because no country combines India’s scale of human capital, diversity of ground-level challenges, and current AI capabilities the way India does.
My own solution to the LPG shortage as an example
As a veteran consultant and policy ideator and contributor, I have explained how we can use the LPG shortage due to the Iran war as a long-term opportunity through my PGurus articles and X posts (@AllAboutModi), tagging many government decision makers. Yet the system doesn’t bring such suggestions into their consideration set because of their preoccupation, which I can understand. (That’s why I think we need the kind of system I’m proposing.)
Rural India consumes approximately 22% of our national LPG. By transitioning most of these households to modern biogas digesters (different from the unviable ones of yesteryears), we don’t just solve the impending cooking fuel crisis; we insulate the nation from any future shocks.
Currently, the Government spends about ₹171/month per PMUY household (factoring in the ₹300/cylinder subsidy and OMC under-recovery costs), offering 9 cylinders annually per PMUY household, but they take only 4.47 on average due to lack of affordability.
I propose we reallocate this subsidy toward a bank-financed National Biogas Transition:
- Household Math: A modern, standardized, packaged household Biogas system requires an EMI of ₹268/month.
- Budget Neutrality: If the Government continues its existing ₹171/month support, but directs it toward the EMI, the rural household pays only ₹100/month as EMI.
- 3X Benefit: For ₹100, the family gets 12 cylinders equivalent of fuel/ year (vs. the current 4.47).
- Free High-value bio-fertilizer: The slurry that comes out is high-value bio-fertilizer, with pathogenic bacteria removed.
The Strategic Win: By redirecting existing LPG subsidies into Biogas asset ownership, we:
- Save ₹40,000 crore in Forex annually.
- Insulate 22% of our energy users from Middle East shocks permanently.
- Shift from “Renting” foreign fuel to “Owning” domestic production.
- Create 3 lakh rural self-employed entrepreneurs, working under LPG distributors.
Hope someone is listening.
To both my ‘LPG alternative’ suggestion and ‘Jan Vichar’ suggestion.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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