Tech hacks to fix India’s woes

Who knew technical skills were so important for ministers in this country? Learn from Railway Minister Piyush Goyal.

Social media was in for a treat when Piyush Goyal, minister for railways, tweeted a video of Train 18, or Vande Bharat Express, hurtling through a railway station at breakneck speed.

News websites and users were quick to notice that the speed of the video had been doubled, to show the ‘lightning speed’ of the train (as Mr Goyal highlighted in his tweet but got the spelling of lightning wrong too: he said ‘lightening’).

Memes and jokes are being thrown at the poor minister, but who knows, he might have stumbled on a brilliant idea. Shouldn’t we use technology to fix some of the pressing issues facing the country right now?

Here are some other sectors where the union (or state, why discriminate?) ministers can take a leaf out of Piyush Goyal’s book.

Farmer Welfare

Currently headed by Radha Mohan Singh, the agriculture ministry is haunted by farmers’ suicides, crop failure and demands for loan waiver. Here is a video the officials can make—get some farmers to smile and dance in front of their fields. Then with heavy-duty colour correction, change the brown, drying crops to lush green ones, put some rose tint on the farmers’ cheeks and a sparkle in their eyes, and brighten up their worn out, dusty clothes. And voila!

Civil Aviation

Minister Suresh Prabhu has many problems on his plate: rising cost of aviation fuel, declining profits of carriers and the need for more aircraft. A very basic photo editing skill can solve all problems in one go—cloning! Clone images of aircraft, airports, even passengers, and place them in appropriate pictures. It is our way of touching the skies.

Science and Technology

Now this will be a personal favourite with Harsh Vardhan, who regularly gets confused between mythology and science. He can use the ‘dissolve’ option, while editing videos, to slowly remove prominent scientists and institutions from the screen and replace them with Gods in imaginary settings. Imagine Ganesha giving some tips to plastic surgeons!

Food and Public Distribution

Ram Vilas Paswan, heading this ministry currently, can fix the long food queues by cropping out the poor folks standing there. Simple!

Defence

Minister Nirmala Sitharaman can make use of the ‘jump cut’ or ‘montage’ technique in video editing; these are used to show passage of time and move ahead. She can move ahead to a time when the contentious Rafale aircraft has been inducted into the forces and the controversy is behind her.

Drinking Water and Sanitation

Minister Uma Bharti will have to employ fairly advanced Photoshop skills here. We don’t see how else we are going to bring the country’s groundwater levels to passable levels and get those dry rural taps to run again.

Coming to sanitation, she can use ‘background blur’ to click pretty pictures of people and not show the garbage in the background.

Labour and Employment

Headed by Santosh Gangwar, the ministry can make use of the ‘noise reduction’ filter while taking pictures of protest rallies and marches. Like the one that happened recently when thousands of students of universities from across India marched in Delhi seeking jobs. Reduce the ‘noise’ to edit out the banners, posters, black flags and raised fists. What do you get? A stunning picture of some enthusiastic youngsters with the historic Red Fort in the background.

Environment and Forests

Minister Harsh Vardhan may have found the perfect panacea to the problem of disappearing forest cover and rivers in India. Do a time-lapse video which shows the vanishing green and blue areas in the country, and just reverse it! Citizens will gasp in delight as they see forests and rivers coming to life in a snap.

Law and Justice

Ravi Shankar Prasad can make use of the ‘increase brightness’ tool to just… say just present a brighter scenario of the state of law and justice in the country.

We could go on but we ran out of editing techniques while the problems we need to address just keep mounting.

We need more technical advancements to reverse the damages being inflicted on the country every second. Adobe, are you listening?