Reborn In 17th century India with Black Technology

22nd October 1660

Four days have passed since Vijay held the meeting with the Cabinet ministers. In the meantime, a lot of things have happened. For one, the festival Dasara has come to a successful end with the day of Vijaya Dashami. For two, Vijay confirmed that the fetus in Kavya is developing very healthily with the help of some doctors and by his own keen intuition. And finally, the preparations for putting forward birth encouragement policies have started and are going on at great intensity in all the ministries.

Vijay, after a few days of absence, finally came back to the Simhasana Bhavana with a lot of documents in his hand.

Ganesh was waiting for him at the door, and seeing him, Vijay immediately motioned, "Come, walk with me."

"Vinod and Gopal, are they both here?" he asked as he arranged the doccuments,

"Yes, Your Majesty, they just arrived a few moments ago. I have made them wait in the guest room. Should I invite them?"

Vijay thought about it and nodded, "Invite them in after 15 minutes." He swiftly went to the conference room as he still had to arrange all the presentations himself.

"As you wish, Your Majesty." Ganesh froze at the entrance of the conference room, did a slight bow, then turned back and left.

---

Prime Minister Vinod was pretty surprised when he saw Gopal in the room. He did not even recognise who it was until moments later when he came to a sudden realisation.

This was because Gopal was a very transparent person in the whole administration and governance of the Bharatiya Empire. His duties and responsibilities were very specialised and not directly related to management, not to mention his directory was directly governed by the imperial committee of His Majesty, more specifically the Vishnu Branch, hence not having a lot of contact.

Maybe if it was not for the fact that Gopal had only been recently appointed after the old director stepped down due to health reasons, Vinod would not even know him.

Vinod was having a casual talk with Gopal since there was nothing else to do, but inwardly, he was speculating as to why His Majesty had invited Gopal and him together.

Moments later, Ganesh came before them and politely invited them into the conference room.

Vinod, with a grunt, stood up, corrected his clothes, and looked at Gopal with a smile. "Shall we?" he asked.

Gopal smiled back. "Please, Sir, after you," he motioned.

Getting into the familiar conference room, they saw that Vijay was still working on something, so they simply sat down.

A few minutes later, Vijay finally wrote down the last words on the presentation sheet and reset the whole presentation to a blank page at the start.

"Vinod, we have discussed birth encouragement policies, haven't we?"

"How are the preparations going?" He knew the answer since the Bharatiya Internal Pragya Brought the news constantly for him, but still, he wanted to know the result from the mouth of the Prime Minister himself.

Vinod thought about it and replied, "We are currently setting up the departments necessary, and internal transfers of personnel are going on. Preparations should be done by the end of the year."

Vijay nodded. "Good, but how do you identify who will need the service?"

Vinod immediately frowned, then shook his head. How is it possible to identify everyone in the empire—all 190,000,000 people? "We were thinking about providing the service at a village level, Your Majesty, meaning we would hand over the task of authenticating whether someone is telling the truth or not to the village Panchayat they were born in, and this village Panchayat will handle the rest of the operation for us."

"Hmm!" Vijay was intrigued. "It's a good plan. If it was not for the fact that the two-revolution printing press had just been invented and we can now get a lot more printing work done, the plan you mentioned would be excellent as a transitional phase between everyone having an identity of their own and everyone's identity being connected with the place they were born in."

Vinod immediately caught the meaning behind His Majesty's words. "Your Majesty, does that mean that you're going to put forward a national identification system?" However, he didn't look very happy.

Vijay nodded with a smile.

Getting the confirmation, Vinod's brows furrowed even deeper. "Your Majesty, isn't it too large of a task for the government? The money required to do a nationwide census will not be any less than a couple of megaprojects." Very soon, they would be implementing the Birth encouragement policies, which were bound to put a dent in the nation's finances. Now, Vinod couldn't really agree to His Majesty's conditions as he always did.

Looking at the clear disagreement on Vinod's face, Vijay smiled. For the first time, he felt like Vinod was acting like the Prime Minister in front of him.

"Haha, don't worry. We don't actually have to spend a lot of money for this."

"If any money is required, it's only for the printing and transportation and nothing else."

Now Vinod was confused. How is it possible to get all the information without sending out civil servants from door to door?

"Care to explain, Gopal?" Vijay looked at Gopal with a smile.

Gopal nodded seriously and looked at Vinod. "Your Excellency, you may not know this, but we have already collected the identity and family data of over 160,000,000 people. The remaining are in some of the most inaccessible places like dense jungles, arid deserts, or the interior of Baluchistan and Pakhtun Pradesh."

Vinod was shocked. "How?" He was filled with disbelief.

"Um, Your Excellency, the data collection actually started over 10 years ago. Every time the Imperial Committee came into contact with a person, be it a soldier serving in the army or a civil servant working for the government, their positions were only legalised after they gave all their details and the details had been authenticated by multiple parties."

"All this data had been secretly collected by a small department His Majesty established and had been piling up."

"The work became more formal once paper production technologies improved. We moved the data from walls to paper."

"And with the establishment of the government and formalisation of the citizen database by the founding of the Citizen Database Management, our work became easier because any time a citizen of the empire had to interact with the government—for example, in order to purchase land, register a company, write exams, join a school, join a college or university, establish a company, move to another state, and so on—the government would always take his details, which were fed back to the Citizen Database Department in order to cross-check and formalise the data over many years."

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"Not only that, we have contacted holy sites like Kashi, Madurai, Ayodhya, Tirupati, and others and asked them to share the ancestral database of the people they have maintained over many centuries."

"In this way, the Citizen Database Management Department actually has more data on the people than the people themselves have on themselves. We actually know their great-great-great-great-grandfather, while they can't even name their great-great-grandfather."

Vinod's mouth was wide open. He knew that they collected basic data from the people they employed and that they would ask for basic data for every interaction they had with the people, but he had just thought that it was a formality. Over time, it had become so ingrained in the government's way of work that he had come to ignore the small detail.

Every month, they did send this data to the Imperial Committee along with all other details about what had happened in the government that month for the Imperial Committee to review, but Vinod had imagined in the back of his mind that the data on the personal details of the people would mostly be ignored. But now, he realised that His Majesty had silently formed a whole database containing the names and details of all the people in the empire.

He looked at Vijay with amazement clearly written on his face.

Vijay, looking at the worshipping gaze, smiled and said nothing. "Now that we have the database ready, which is the hardest part of the whole giving-people-national-identity thing, we can immediately start printing the identity documents."

"I have come up with five different documents, three of which are compulsory and the other two optional, together which I call *Bharatiya stack*, meaning the stack of documents essential for a person's identity."

"The core of our national identification process will be the Aadhaar card, which will from now on be the basic identification card for the whole nation. It should look something like this," Vijay said as he flipped over the presentation. An outline of an identity card, very similar to the Aadhaar card of the future, was found—the only difference being that there was no photo on the Aadhaar card since the printing press couldn't be calibrated for each and every person to print their photos.

"The second document is the voter ID. This will be the form of identification for every voter in the empire, and this document can be obtained by the people as soon as they pass their voter assessment examination, held before every major election to determine that the voter has a healthy, functional brain with an average intelligence able to determine what is good for himself or herself."

"The issuance of this second identification could be done after the examination results are announced in a few months."

"Number three, it's the ration card. This will be the identification mostly useful for the middle and aspirational classes of society who still depend on government aid to get rations."@@novelbin@@

"This can be eliminated in the future with the development of society, but for now, at least for the middle and aspirational class, this is a *must-have* identification card."

"The fourth is the tax certificate or income certificate, which could determine which class a person and his family belong to in order to determine what level of support they will get from the government."

"This can be determined by the number of assets they have in our database. The Land Audit and Management Bureau can be used in order to make this determination."

"As for determining how much salary a person is earning, there is no good solution for this since people might always lie, but the best way, for now, is to find out what a person's major streams of income are and determine on average how much a person in that field will earn. This will not give us an accurate measurement of a person's wealth, but it will definitely drastically reduce the chances of us getting it wrong by a large margin."

"Now, the last one will be the passport, which will be a form of identification for anyone in the Bharatiya Empire who wants to go abroad or for anyone who is abroad and wants to visit the Bharatiya Empire. As of right now, this document is only applicable to the high class and elite class of society. Maybe in the future, it will also be applicable to the aspirational and middle classes, since we aim to send a lot of people to Southeast Asia for development opportunities, but for now, there is no rush to immediately issue this document."

"For now, the Aadhaar card and tax certificate, the two most essential identification details required for receiving benefits from the birth encouragement policies, should be printed as soon as possible and made public."

"The printing of these documents will directly fall under the purview of the Monetary Press of Bharat, the department responsible for printing money."

"This is a very good time since the printing of money has stopped, so the empty printers that are modified to print money with several safety features could be used to print the identification cards."

Hours later, both Vinod and Gopal came out of the room with determined expressions on their faces.