Opinion Windmills of the mind

The Narendra Modi government has come face to face with the perils of crowdsourcing, which it had deployed to give people precisely what they want, including a sense of agency and participation in government. Can power be generated from the wind of passing trains, wondered a former bank official, and he shot off a letter to the PMO. The quest should have stopped there, for anyone with a passing acquaintance with school physics would know that the intermittent passing of trains cannot keep windmills turning. And whoever is now in charge of wit and humour at the PMO should have added that since almost all Indian trains are slow and late, their capacity to deliver wind power is pathetically meagre.

But maybe the humour portfolio has been abolished in the new PMO. In a display of inhumanly efficient automatism, the letter was forwarded to the railways ministry. And ever since, the babus at Rail Bhavan have been busy keeping various players updated on the developmental status of this stillborn idea — the originator, the chairman of the Railway Board and the PMO.

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Certainly, all ideas related to alternative energy should be entertained. Some pretty incredible products are already in development. A tattoo battery powered by human sweat can charge an iPod. Sugar-powered batteries and supercapacitors made of marijuana fibre are serious projects. In Stockholm and Paris, human body heat harvested from subway stations is being used to heat buildings. But usually, ideas about new energy sources violate the first or second laws of thermodynamics. A railway windmill isn’t half as bad — it is only financially implausible. Even so, it should have been stopped dead at the PMO. Crowdsourcing is an exercise in smart filtering, but so far, it would appear that the government doesn’t have the smarts for it.