The pandemic forced us into a natural experiment that has given us valuable insights about the natural world in the absence of humans. It also allowed us to experiment with changing various regulations to continue to operate in a lockdown. We should use the learnings from this natural experiment to figure out how to implement empirical policy-making by implementing regulatory sandboxes for our policy endeavours.

If we had built our grid based on renewable power generation we would have made battery storage a part of grid design. Now as we transition away from centralised to distributed power generation V2G solutions offer a useful alternatives that India, given its recent policy changes, is ideally suited to implement.

Breakthroughs in science require patient capital that must be provided by the government. Scientists need to be given a long rope and not be held to the standards of accountability to which we typically hold the government. They need to have bipartisan [[political support]] as they operate at time-scales beyond that which politicians normally function within. They need pipelines to market that will allow these ideas to be naturally commercialised.

The March 2021 Unmanned Aircraft Rules have imposed such a heavy compliance burden on drones that any hope of a drone renaissance has become vanishingly slim. Unless the government liberalises these restrictions it will have a chilling effect on the drone industry at a time when it should be having its iPhone moment.

Most knowledge management systems are deliver on the expectations knowledge workers have of them. Tools for networked thought are ideal to develop the sorts of big picture thinking that needs to be part of a legal knowledge management system. The more you use these systems the more information they surface.

If the Future of Work is hybrid we will need to find a solution to the hybrid work paradox. We will need to find a way to allow everyone the flexibility to work from home when they want yet still be able to benefit from working collaboratively with their colleagues in the ways that we only know to make possible in office. This will call for rethinking meetings so that it works just as well with a mixture of in-person and dial in participants. We will need to re-think network security to account for people calling in from everywhere and not just from behind the office firewall.

The Intermediary Guidelines 2021 just make things more confused. It will cover social media intermediaries on the basis of registered users and not active users which can be a big deal for many companies that have a relatively small active Indian user base. It will apply to services that provide messaging as just an ancillary service - and most digital platforms do that. Voluntary verification is also a strange requirement since it doesn’t ensure traceability because its not mandatory. Anyone who fails to comply even with the most minor requirements of the regulations will lose their intermediary liability protections.

We need different protocols to deal with the pandemic in rural India. Instead of supplying oxygen we need to provide them with a supply of medicines and basic equipment they need. Since it is not feasible to get RTPCR tests done in a reasonable time frame we need to replace that with syndromic testing using oximeters and thermometers. And we need to leverage our decentralised healthcare networks.

The concept of a sovereign nation-state grew out of the Treaty of Westphalia that established the absolute authority of a sovereign power over its territory. Technology compresses distances and helped improve control over the far flung regions of nation-states. The internet compressed distances even more. This coupled with globalisation has challenged the concept of sovereignty. Nations have opposed this with data localisation laws and slowly big tech companies are agreeing to be bound by concepts of regional sovereignty.

Given the urgency to vaccinate the world there is an urgent need to ramp up production of vaccines. All that is coming in the way of that is the intellectual property rights over vaccine recipes. What is required is a temporary vaccine waiver of intellectual property rights in order to encourage worldwide manufacture.