• I used Claude to verify factual claims cited in this post. The arguments and writing are my own.

The green revolution in the 1970s taught India that short term changes can create sovereignty and reduce dependence but in the long run that slowly leads to erosion of capacity, deaths and stagnation in agricultural prosperity. Our exports have increased but productivity gains have slowed, export has increased but farmer prosperity is decreasing leading to 28 suicides every day in India. My fear is that the same will happen with AI in India but much faster. The danger is that a government deploying AI, will become a verification economy leading to prosperity on paper but cognitive and judgement offload in reality. When advanced AI comes, we will no longer have the capability to govern it because the institutional capacity of an already very fragile institution will be degraded to a checkbox lacking any real judgement.

It was the 1960s when India relied heavily on food aid from the US. India was hit by serious famines in 1965 and 1966, when the US used the food aid as a leverage to pressurise the government to use modernised tools to increase agricultural output. Under pressure we rapidly introduced high yield seeds, modernised agriculture, and pesticides. Before this, India wasn’t self sufficient. Introducing these lead to amazing yields on paper, India became self-sufficient on the agricultural front. Our exports increased, our economy benefitted due to self sufficiency. At that time, I don’t think we could have made a better decision. It was the need of the hour due to competitive pressure, over reliance on other nations and to protect our sovereignty. But the current time, we extract the highest amount of groundwater in the world, accounting for nearly 25% of global extraction (More than combined US and China’s groundwater extraction). If we continue like this, in a few decades we will be seeing the Indian economy in a deep state of crisis where it would be hard for us to comeback. We are already seeing food inflation. Our exploitation of groundwater has led to per capita water decreasing by half since the green revolution. It is silently and invisibly creating a crisis that we aren’t prepared to handle.

This is what I fear will happen with AI but at much faster speed than the green revolution. Today, I work in the government. We are already a very fragile public system. It’s neither perfect nor efficient, there’s huge public outcry to improve them. That’s why the central government is pushing for deployment of AI in the public systems and for AI sovereignty. The deployment may be as we did it during the DPI but it is the governance that I am most concerned about. Aadhaar’s deployment was well executed but even after 15 years we are still figuring out how to govern the Aadhaar data. We talk a lot about how this will improve efficiency, but our institutions, similar to when we adopted the green revolution, aren't equipped for it in the long run. Farmers were pulled into a model that rewarded short-term output while hiding long-term ecological costs  and they saw the boom in their revenue at the beginning. The same is happening with government officials, they will instead become verification tools while their output will increase. Slowly, the only judgement they will be making will be to tick a checkbox. This is where, the institutional failure begins similar to how farmers keep committing suicides and our nation can’t do anything to protect them. There will not be suicides but small accumulative x-risks will carry forward leading to erosion of institutions as described by Kasirzadeh. 

It will begin by making officers verifiers rather than decision makers. The system will reward increased output and officers who question will either succumb to competitive pressure or will look slower. Eventually, judgement will be a liability and reasoning will move to the model.

Then the failures will accumulate quietly. Citizens will be wrongly excluded from benefits. Risk scores will misclassify people. Grievance systems will become harder to challenge because no one can explain the decision. Departments will respond by adding more checklists and dashboards, not by rebuilding judgment. The institution will still look functional, but its cognitive capacity will hollow out.

The crisis comes later, when advanced AI systems require real governance. By then, the officials meant to regulate, audit, and override these systems may have spent merely approving their outputs. The state will have efficiency on paper, but no institutional muscle left to govern the machinery it has adopted.