Reborn In 17th century India with Black Technology - Chapter 1131

Capítulo 1131: Summit (1) (Data)

April 1698

Shaurya Royal Palace, Imperial capital Bengaluru, Akhand Bharatiya Empire

Ugadi had just come to an end, and Vijay sat in the main seat at the dinner table, around a rare family reunion. Looking at his grey-haired wife, who still looks so beautiful, his emotions became turbulent, and looking at his children and grandchildren, he felt extreme contentment and happiness. He felt very fulfilled.

Vijay was around 69, in an age where people would already start to retire. As for his wife, Kavya, well, she was 65. Due to the improved medical levels, and especially due to the exclusive medical technologies that are available to the royal family, Kavya is still healthy, although she has already retired from authoring books after she released two more volumes of the 2012 A Star Wanderers Journey over the last 6 years. His kid Agni was already 42, and Vijay had given control over the day-to-day affairs of the empire to him while he took care of the important things, while Vedanth and Tanvika were both 37 years old.

After the development of the 3rd-generation Bhairavi Jalapudra engine, Vedant had taken a break from research and spent most of his time in his kingdom. It is only recently that he came back to celebrate Ugadi. As for Tanvika, she was still embroiled in the research of the immunity warrior programme, which aimed to boost the immunity by the method of training the immune response of the body since a young age, and under her supervision the death rate has come down drastically, and the immunity of the people who made it out safely, which are over 90 to 95% of them, have gone up considerably, some people not getting sick even if they came into direct contact with other people who are sick.

One of the main reasons for the breakthrough in the immunity warrior programme was thanks to the programme started by the Ministry of Health, a programme to help other countries validate if their ancient recipes, medicinal recipes, are valid and stand up to scientific scrutiny. At first the largest target, the Chinese, did not agree, due to which the Japanese and the Koreans also hesitated, but after things were made clear that the patent of the medicine would belong to the Ming Empire, and any derivative patents up to the 4th generation derived from the original recipy would have shared patent holding between the Bharatiya Empire and the Ming Empire, the deal was signed.

The Bharatiya Empire, in the short term, was getting the weaker deal, but in the long term, it was still a good thing, especially since medicinal recipes, especially the ones that worked, are like a collection of important books in a library. Although most of the time they are not read, just having them gives the establishment a firm foundation to build on top of, not to mention that, due to the terms and conditions of the deal being changed to even patent sharing, the royalty given to the Ming Empire has gone from 75% to just 35%, essentially switching places.

Anyway, with the inflow of tens of thousands of new medicinal recipes, there was bound to be one or two that would set off the creative impulse in the minds of the scientists, and it turns out there was an unusual remedy that claimed to keep diseases away after drinking it. It was this 1000-year-old recipe that inspired Tanvika a lot, and that is what led to a much more controlled experiment in the immunity warrior programme and much better results.

In front of Vijay, six little guys restlessly started eating. They were none other than his grandchildren, Rama (18) and Pallavi (12), the son and daughter of Agni, Bhavish (15) and Raguram (9), the sons of Tanvika, and finally, Janaki (14) and Harivarma (7), the son and daughter of Vedant.

Every time he saw his complete family, he couldn’t help but feel emotional. When he took over the throne, he was the last direct descendant of the Devaraya family. His closest relative was a cousin from his great uncle’s lineage, but unfortunately, he had to be killed as he tried to usurp the throne. After his death, Vijay had no direct family members left, but now the Devaraya family has become a royal family with 12 members, with six of them being his grandchildren alone. It is as if it has become a custom to have two children. All three of his descendants decided to have two kids. It is not like Vijay is complaining, though if they wanted more, they could actually do so; sadly, he doesn’t think they will.

Anyway, the breakfast ended in such a warm atmosphere, and Vijay unfortunately had to leave to the parliament, as it is customary to hold the year-end summit right after Ugadi, and today happens to be the day after Ugadi.

Things have changed a lot in the last six years.

Bengaluru has gotten another metro line, for one, along with Bengaluru getting another round of investment of over 2 billion to further enhance the city’s image by artistic embellishments more than it was before, which was already 70% done, and for two, Thiruvananthapuram became the first city outside Bengaluru to get approved for a metro transportation. Although it is a single-line metro taking people from the port to the outskirts of the city, a metro is a metro nonetheless.

Besides, the most important change is, along with the metro, Thiruvananthapuram also got a Bengaluru-style facelift, with its streets now being paved using precision-cut rocks instead of tar or cement, and the entire government infrastructure receiving an upgrade in both size and artistry.

And Thiruvananthapuram was not the only one, the military capital of the empire, Nagpur, saw similar changes, and the agricultural capital of the empire, Indraprastha, was no different. Although the investments in these cities were nowhere close to the investment in the capital, with each taking up an average of 1.5 billion, knowing the emperor and his love for infrastructure and urban art, many people thought the number would be doubled soon enough.

In fact, they were not wrong. Vijay was indeed thinking of investing more, but honestly, it was not because of his recklessness and his weird pursuit of artistic cities; it was because too much money was flowing into the empire, and he had to find a way to use them all up.

As for how much of it was true and how much was an excuse, only he would know, but after he got to the Maha Sabha, the parliament, the year-end summit of 1698 kicked off.

The size of the empire remained the same at 6.3 million square kilometres, albeit with Tibet, Balochistan, and Pashtun Pradesh being more connected to the mainland thanks to the billions of Varaha invested into developing infrastructure in these harsh areas every year.

And due to the industrial wave that took over the empire, a lot of the population was retained within the empire. As a result, in the last six years, the resident population of the Bharatiya Empire reached over 405,000,000 people, 80 million more than it was like in 1689.

In Vijay’s predictions, the population would stabilise around 500 million or even 600 million in the next 10 to 20 years, which in his opinion was needed to maintain the industrial output of the Bharatiya Empire, since labour will still be the main requirement for industry at least until automation driven by Internet technology and artificial intelligence takes over, but that is too far ahead.

He was simply trying to avoid a situation like America, where all the industries had to be given away due to labour simply becoming too expensive.

With automation, he reckons that with around 500 to 600 million population, the prices could still be kept low. After all, by the time he was assassinated, there were rumours that the population of 1.4 billion in China was a false number, and there were only around 500 to 600 million people.

As for the religious demographic, it’s basically the same, 98.5% being Dharmic, with the people of the Bharatiya Empire having several different Dharmic beliefs, be it the worship of a certain god, following the Sikh philosophy, the Buddhist philosophy, or even the Jain philosophy. Thanks to all sorts of schools of thought being readily available for people to study, faith has become much more fluid, and people adopt different ideologies from different schools of thought as they see fit for personal life.

So it is not rare in the current Bharatiya Empire that someone is a staunch Shiva Bhakt but follows the Sikh school of thought, or someone being a worshipper of Maa Khali but follows the Jain way of life and avoids harm to animals and plants as much as possible. For Vijay, this was very beautiful, and something he wished would happen in his last life, but alas. The remaining 1.5% are the Orthodox Muslims in the western part of the empire, along with the Christians who decided to settle in the empire.

To be Continued…

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