How Ecosystems Evolve

The more I think about it, it seems that systems evolve through stages.

Stage #1: Good men, Bad Situation

When the situation is dire and you have to figure out a way to fix the situation - knowing that you have to make corrections along the way.

Be it education in the 70s where schools were opened, and lunch schemes were announced to get more kids into schools, or be the green revolution - which through whatever means increased production, or the white revolution (which has some context for the protests going on right now). From a nutrition point of view the country needed milk and eggs (and we needed a quick fix) and Good men took a call that it was better to solve the issue than debate politics around it. that is usually Stage #1.

Stage #2 : Enter, the hacks

We do need to move things towards systems and processes and things that work "for us, and well", and the only way we can transition towards that is for groups of people to look at experimenting and starting to come up with new and ingenious solutions, and people who will take our old and ancient ways and see how to improve them. I call them "hacks" for lack of a better term, but dont let the term underplay the importance of it.

This is where we are right now in today's Indian society. we need to start thinking about education - from a PoV of learning (not mind numbingly memorizing), agriculture (in terms of health and also crops that are better suited for our environment) and dairy and poultry (we should be investing heavily in R&D to see how to make our native breeds produce more - if possible) And these are just three of the scenarios that comes to mind, but from the way we build startup ecosystems to financial landscape, to how we treat the environment, how we build cities - we need hacks in every one of these sectors to start thinking about it - and doing small and contained experiments and if we succeed to see if scalability is attainable.

Stage #3 : Optimization and Regulation

This is where the professionals come in. By this time, education institutes would have taken the best practices that evolved out of all the experiments (which means they all need to be documented meticulously) and create professionals who can be entrusted to regulate and optimize the system and ensure that the long-term goals of sustainability, independence and the health and wealth of the people are kept in mind.

We as a country are in the beginning of Stage #2 in a lot of cases. In dire need of Stage #1 (and lacking good men and women) in some - cases like mental health, rehab, marginal societies etc.

If we optimize before we get our indigenious alternatives in place, we end up with a deadlock. A system where there are too many regulations even before we've figured out a couple of options that work very well for India, would lead to skewed outputs. yet we seem to be doing that, quite a lot in quite a few parts of this society.

More than anything, the need is to gather all these hacks - the super heroes - who will look at the world around them, and see what can be and envision and through sweat and blood bring that future to life. Calling out to those heroes.