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Bill Gates spent four days in India meeting with political leaders, government officials, scientists, “philanthropists” and others.

According to Gates, The Gates Foundation funds more work in India than in any other country, other than the United States.

What were his goals during his recent trip to India? To sniff out opportunities to further implement his digital IDs and “smart farming.”

On Tuesday, Bill Gates published a blog stating that he had “found inspiration in India.”  What he really meant he was pleased to find opportunities to enslave some of the world’s poorest and make a lot of money while doing so.

He met with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, specifically about the way the world’s “biggest democracy” goes about implementing digital public infrastructure (“DPI”).

 “We had a great conversation about how the Gates Foundation can continue to support India’s goals on digital technology, women-led development, and innovation in agriculture, health, and climate change,” Gates wrote about the hour’s discussion he had with Modi.

DPI is a term that in alarming unison crops up in various United Nations, European Union and associated groups’ policies and statements.  “A buzzword that denotes the plan to introduce digital ID and digital payments literally wherever on Earth possible by 2030,” Reclaim the Net wrote.

Gates also met with Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, who is one of the co-creators of the Aadhaar, a digital ID system and one of India’s key DPI components. Aadhaar has been a subject of controversy in India for its massive scale and privacy concerns.

Gates wrote: “In Hyderabad, I also met with Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani, whom I’ve known for years, and other experts who got me up to speed on the latest in digital public infrastructure, or DPI. That’s the system that is making it possible to use digital technology to provide all kinds of services, including digital payments, advice for farmers, education, and much more. India’s progress on DPI is a model that other countries are learning from.”

What Gates failed to mention is the rise of scams which involve Aadhaar numbers.  Scams that use highly detailed information to appear genuine have been reported very frequently across the country over the past few months, NDTV reported.

In 2018, following up on an investigation by The Tribune, The Quint discovered that people without official credentials can gain access to and become administrators of the official Aadhaar database. This database contains the names, mobile numbers, and addresses of every Indian linked to the Unique Identification Authority of India (“UIDAI”) scheme, an alternative name for Aadhaar. However, the problem doesn’t end there. Once you are an admin, you have the power to select and give admin privileges to anyone you choose, regardless of their nationality. Furthermore, the Aadhaar database does not have any mechanisms in place to verify the legitimacy of the people who are granted access.

India is a union of states and has a quasi-federal form of government called a “union” or “central” government. Power is divided between the governments of the union and the states of India, the latter being ruled by the chief ministers. There are 28 states and 8 union territories.  One of the states is West Bengal.

On 27 February 2024, The Quint reported that the Aadhaar IDs of people in West Bengal had been deactivated.  The mass deactivation of Aadhaar numbers was attributed by Union Minister Shantanu Thakur to “some technical fault.”  But questions remain as to what actually happened. 

From the outset, concerns have arisen over the alleged targeted cancellation of Aadhaar cards, particularly affecting minority communities by the Union Government. The state government asserted that the Union Government intentionally targeted certain demographic groups, especially from the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities, through these deactivations. According to the chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, the cancellations had a disproportionate impact on minority populations across the state.

After marketing his dodgy digital IDs, Gates then went on in his blog to describe the marketing of what he calls “smart farming” in India.  “I got to see India’s DPI in action when I toured an agricultural monitoring centre in Bhubaneswar. At this facility, government agriculture experts send advice and real-time updates to 6.5 million farmers via phone,” he said.

“The Gates Foundation supports a lot of work on agriculture in India, so I was excited to attend a learning session in New Delhi on Thursday with experts on livestock and crops. I learned about the latest innovations in artificial insemination, buffalo breeding, climate-smart seeds and much more,” he added.

Bill Gates is not “supporting” work on agriculture for the benefit of farmers or the population at large.  He is taking control of the food supply across the world, including India, for his benefit and the benefit of his collaborators.

At the end of 2022, The ETC Group published a report titled ‘Food Barons 2022 – Crisis Profiteering, Digitalization and Shifting Power’.  In it, The ETC Group describe how the “Food Barons” are introducing a suite of new technologies and “techno-fixes” that are conceived and designed to entrench corporate control over food and agriculture even further.

“Tech giants are becoming prime players in food, handling the data, networking and AI that undergirds the newly digitised food chain,” The ETC Group wrote introducing their report.

In the report, The ETC Group describe the “dream farm” of the Technocrats.  It is a “farm of one” where technology does all the work and rakes in the profits:

Every leading agrochemical company offers its own digital ag platform marketed to farmers as a way to transform on-farm data into savings that will ultimately increase farm profitability:

The Holy Grail, they say, is a “farm of one,” where a single farmer/data manager (equipped with many thumbs, perhaps?) can log on to a connected device, watch as the algorithms calculate input prescriptions – based on data collected from in-field sensors and hyperspectral imaging – and then send those prescriptions to a fleet of contracted drones that will dump herbicide, fungicide, fertilizer, growth regulator or other input in a just-right dosage for each plant growing in the field.

Post-harvest, the farmer can supposedly sit back and enjoy the profits from increased crop sales and reduced labour costs – as well as from payments for ‘carbon sequestration’ verified by traceability data collected and stored on a blockchain.

Food Barons 2022, ETC Group, September 2022, pg. 22

With Big Tech’s encroachment into agriculture, we have now moved from “Is this food safe to eat?” to “Is this even “food” and is it edible?”

Sources and further reading:

• Bill Gates Finds “Inspiration” in India’s Controversial Digital ID Program, Reclaim the Net, 6 March 2024
• Farmer Bill and his wife, the private owners of more farmland than anyone else in America, The Exposé, 21 April 2022
• Report details how a handful of Corporations are taking control of the World’s Food Supply, The Exposé, 13 February 2023
• Sandi Adams: Farming is being destroyed and it’s being destroyed by design, The Exposé, 14 February 2024