Beyond Digital | Technology Transformation | Enterprise Strategy
As a species, we’ve been looking up at the stars for millennia but only more recently have we had the means to actually reach them. And now that we can, a thorny question emerges: who gets to own what’s up there, and more importantly, who …
It’s the digital age and we’re drowning in information, but starving for truth. Every day, millions of people scroll through news feeds packed with headlines designed not just to inform but to provoke. Some of it is harmless nonsense like celebrity gossip that turns out …
I bet not many of you have yet heard about India’s expanding Sanchar Saathi initiative. TLDR: It’s a “citizen-centric” telecom security platform or app that’s meant to help the Indian government block stolen phones, verify device authenticity, track SIM connections, and report fraudulent communication.
Sanchar Saathi presents a textbook case of the Surveillance State dressed in the language of public safety. On paper, it seems quite reasonable. Helping people to recover stolen phones, cracking down on fraud, bringing order to a chaotic secondhand market. But in practice, it’s building infrastructure for something far more invasive.
Let’s start with what works. India has a genuine problem with device theft and telecom fraud. The numbers back this up: 4.2 million blocked devices, 2.6 million traced, 700,000 recovered through the app. Those aren’t trivial figures. People lose phones, criminals exploit IMEI cloning and the informal secondhand market creates genuine vulnerabilities. A centralised system that helps victims recover their property has obvious merit.
But here’s where intent diverges from execution. The Indian government isn’t just offering a service. It’s mandating participation. Requiring manufacturers to preinstall Sanchar Saathi on every device, pushing it to existing phones via updates, and now creating an API to feed secondhand transaction data directly into government databases crosses a line from service to surveillance infrastructure.
The telecom minister says it’s “completely voluntary” and users can delete the app. That’s technically true in the same way your taxes are voluntary. You can choose to not pay them but good luck with the consequences. When an app is preinstalled, prominently placed and its “functionalities are not disabled or restricted,” the framing isn’t neutral. It’s coercive by design. Most users won’t know they can remove it. Many who do will worry about whether deleting a government app flags them somehow.
This matters because we’re not talking about a small pilot program. India has roughly 700 million smartphones in circulation. Creating a centralised database linking devices to identities at that scale isn’t just an administrative measure. It’s building the architecture for mass surveillance. And the government has been conspicuously silent on critical questions: Who accesses this data? How long is it retained? What safeguards exist against misuse? What prevents function creep, where a system built for one purpose quietly expands to others?
History is not encouraging here. Governments consistently expand surveillance tools beyond their stated intent. A database built to track stolen phones today becomes a tool to monitor dissidents tomorrow. The infrastructure doesn’t care about intent. It cares about capability. Once you’ve built a system that knows where every phone is, who owns it, and how it changes hands, you’ve also built something that can be weaponised.
The planned API for ecommerce platforms compounds the problem. Private companies become de facto data collectors for the state, uploading customer identities and device details directly to government servers. This shifts liability onto businesses while giving authorities unprecedented visibility into the secondhand market which, notably, serves India’s less affluent consumers who can’t afford new devices. You’re essentially creating a registry of economic activity for people with the least power to push back.
Digital rights advocates are right to sound alarms. Concerns about “databasing” every device capture the core issue. They are creating permanent records of ownership and transaction history that outlive the devices themselves. When the government mandates a single solution and controls the data pipeline, private sector alternatives can’t compete. You lose the diversity and resilience that comes from multiple approaches.
None of this means India shouldn’t address device theft or telecom fraud. But proportionality matters. You don’t need a national registry of every phone and its owner to help people recover stolen devices. You don’t need mandatory preinstallation to offer a useful service. You don’t need an API feeding transaction data to government servers to bring transparency to the secondhand market.
What you need are targeted solutions with built-in constraints: voluntary opt-in systems, transparent data governance, independent oversight, sunset clauses that force periodic review, and consequences for misuse.
India’s approach has none of these safeguards. It’s building the infrastructure first and promising to think about privacy later. A classic case of bolting the stable doors after the horse has bolted.
The uncomfortable truth is that authoritarian tools don’t announce themselves as such. They arrive wrapped in legitimate concerns about crime, security, and public welfare. The test isn’t whether the stated goal is reasonable as it usually is. The test is whether the means are proportionate and whether adequate safeguards exist to prevent abuse.
Welcome to the age of the algorithm. If you live in the US, you might’ve heard that the retailer, Target has recently started playing a new game with the data it knows about you and as a result, your data just made your groceries more …
I was rushing through my morning routine earlier, prepping for yet another flight, my umpteenth this year, when frustration suddenly hit. I was squeezed between back-to-back meetings before takeoff and presentations waiting the moment I landed, and it struck me: why is air travel still …
Soham Parekh is a Mumbai-based software engineer who simultaneously worked for multiple Silicon Valley startups over the last 2 years. His case has presented the tech world a very fascinating ethical dilemma that personally, I think transcends the simple questions of workplace honesty. In case you’re unfamiliar with this story, this TechCrunch article provides a fair summary to bring you up to speed of last week’s happenings with this story.
The Soham Parekh affair transcends the particulars of one individual’s professional conduct or the specific companies that allegedly employed him simultaneously. It illuminates a deeper structural tension at the heart of modern capitalism, i.e. the growing disconnect between corporate loyalty expectations and the economic realities facing today’s workforce.
In an era of diminished job security and stagnant wages, Parekh’s actions, as ethically dubious as they are, represent a calculated response to systemic market failures. The venture capital ecosystem, with its emphasis on rapid scaling and worker expendability, has created conditions where traditional employment relationships increasingly resemble one-sided contracts. When companies prioritise shareholder returns over employee welfare, rational actors inevitably seek alternative strategies for economic survival to deal with increasing economic inequality, job insecurity and the erosion of job security in favour of a rising “gig economy” and normalisation of multiple income streams.
It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that what we’re seeing here is a rational response to irrational market conditions, whereby workers are incentivised to hedge their employment bets in ways that would have been unthinkable in previous generations. The implications reach beyond Silicon Valley, touching on questions of workplace ethics, employment law and the social contract between employees and their employers in an era of economic uncertainty.
The modern tech industry operates on principles that tend to prioritise capital accumulation over worker welfare. This is more usually the case especially when it comes to dealing with global talent. The implication of this is that conditions where extreme survival strategies become logical responses to this systemic exploitation then become more common-place.
It’s no secret that VC-funded startups routinely engage in practices that demonstrate little regard for worker security or well-being. The industry’s normalisation of mass layoffs, the prevalence of unpaid overtime disguised as “passion,” and the systematic extraction of value from workers through equity structures that rarely benefit employees all contribute to an environment where traditional notions of employer loyalty become difficult to justify.
VC-funded startups will also frequently use equity compensation as a substitute for fair wages, knowing that the vast majority of their so-called ‘equity grants’ will prove worthless while providing immediate cost savings. To be more brutally honest, this is no more than a sophisticated form of wage theft, providing immediate cost savings to companies while transferring the financial risk to employees who often lack the means to the information asymmetries enjoyed by their employers.
VC-funded companies will also usually hire and terminate employees at will, often for reasons entirely disconnected from performance, the moral obligation for exclusive commitment becomes questionable. This industry’s normalisation of mass layoffs coupled with the prevalence of unpaid overtime romantically disguised as “passion,” and the systematic extraction of value from workers through equity structures that rarely benefit employees all easily contribute to an environment where traditional notions of employer loyalty become quite difficult to justify.
Let’s also not forget Silicon Valley’s practice of hiring global talent at below-market rates while extracting maximum value from their expertise which some would argue represents a form of digital colonialism that exploits geographic wage disparities while maintaining the fiction of meritocratic fairness.
These contradictions render corporate demands for exclusive loyalty intellectually indefensible. Heavily exploitative company practices and demands for loyalty cannot coexist indefinitely in a sustainable employer-employee symbiotic relationship. Cases like Soham Parekh’s signal that workers have begun voting with their divided allegiances.
This case ultimately reveals the ethical contradictions inherent in contemporary capitalism, where individual survival strategies increasingly conflict with corporate expectations in an environment of systematic exploitation. While Soham’s deception was clearly unprofessional and potentially harmful, his actions although inexcusable, could also be seen as a rational response to a system that prioritises capital accumulation over worker welfare.
The real ethical failure here may not just lie with Soham’s individual choices but also with a system that creates conditions where such extreme measures as working 140 hours a week appear necessary for survival. The truth is this oft-celebrated ‘hustle-culture’ within VC-funded startup ecosystems, with its celebration of disruption and resource extraction, has also created a labour environment whether directly or indirectly, where the traditional notions of loyalty and commitment have become very one-sided expectations. So, rather than focusing solely on individual ethical failures, it might serve us better to examine how to create more equitable and sustainable employment relationships for both employers and workers alike.
The more important question for us to focus on then isn’t just whether Soham acted ethically, but whether the system that produced his actions can itself be considered ethical. After all, in a truly just economic system, workers would not need to resort to such extreme measures for survival, and employers would not operate on assumptions of unlimited extraction from their workforce. Until we begin to address these systemic issues, cases like Soham Parekh’s will continue to emerge as symptoms of deeper structural problems rather than isolated individual failures.
Apple, last week, entered the AI debate in a very interesting way. They published a Whitepaper that basically challenges the AI industry’s core assumptions on machine learning and reasoning… Apple’s research suggests that large reasoning models (LRMs) that form the basis for AI’s complex problem …
“Your data has been compromised.” These five words have become so common in my inbox that they’ve almost lost their capacity to alarm me anymore. The first time I ever saw this announcement, I realised that I’d probably need to quit my day job just …
Innovation has become something of a paradox in many large orgs today. On the surface, companies claim to value creativity and new ideas, yet in practice, they often stifle internal innovation in favour of acquiring startups. This approach, while tempting, is a short-term fix that undermines long-term growth. Let me explain why and advance my theory on how orgs can break the cycle to foster meaningful, sustainable innovation from within.
I was recently reminded of this paradox during a conversation with a former colleague. We reminisced about our time together many years ago at a company that prided itself on its innovative culture. Employees were often encouraged to speak up, share ideas, and challenge the status quo. It was baked into the company’s DNA. Yet, under new leadership, something shifted. Despite the rhetoric, my colleague felt his team’s ideas were no longer valued. Instead, the company turned to what one might call “innovation by acquisition”, i.e. buying smaller, nimbler startups.
Now this approach is of course understandable: startups move fast, take risks, and aren’t bogged down by legacy systems or entrenched thinking. They represent a convenient innovation shortcut. But as someone who has spent a few years helping businesses navigate this landscape, I’ve observed that acquisition-driven innovation often fails to deliver lasting transformation, which prompted me to write this blog today.
When orgs repeatedly look outward for innovation, they inadvertently send a message to their own talent: your ideas aren’t valued here. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where internal creativity withers as the expense of acquiring external innovation grows.
Over time, this erodes morale and stifles creativity, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Internal innovation withers, and the orgs becomes increasingly dependent on external acquisition which can easily become a costly and unsustainable cycle.
The truth is, innovation isn’t just about technology; it’s mostly about people. The systems we build reflect the cultures that produce them. To break this cycle, orgs would need to rethink their approach to innovation and create environments where creativity can thrive from within.
To be crystal clear, I’m not anti-acquisitions. I think they have their place. BUT, they can never replace the enduring capacity to reimagine the future from within. Building a culture of internal innovation will require sustained commitment and a willingness to invest in people, processes, and mindsets that prioritise long-term growth over short-term gains. In today’s world of rocket-speed accelerating change, one may argue that this may be the only sustainable competitive advantage. The future belongs to those who can innovate continuously and not just once.
Some 4 years ago, Apple Inc. gifted us their latest (at the time) innovation in music headphones, the AirPods Max. When I saw my first pair, like anyone faced with a new tech device, I looked around for the power button but couldn’t find any. …