Yes, I often lament about abstraction winning over connection. But here’s an example of abstraction actually serving connection, and it’s worth understanding why.
In Dharwad, Karnataka, an employer who needed 20 welders was 800 metres away from an ITI full of trained welders. Neither knew the other existed. The district didn’t have an unemployment problem as much as it had an invisibility problem. All the supply and demand in the world, and nothing moving because the relational tissue was too thin.
The Blue Dot (ONEST) project uses digital infrastructure (tools of abstraction! Maps! Protocols! Verified credentials!) to make local jobs and local job-seekers visible to each other. Students see openings within 15 km of home, and employers see verified candidates across the road. Simple enough. But what makes it different from most tech “solutions” is what it chose not to do.
It removes the wrong friction, neighbours who never meet, while preserving the right friction: locality, human verification, placement officers accompanying volunteers door-to-door, nightly calls to fix what broke, trust built face-to-face.
Most platforms replace relationship while this one restores it. Most systems optimise for scale without limit, while this one has a built-in boundary radius of 15 km as a choice.
There’s a moment in the piece where a boy feels relief, realising he can work nearby and still care for his widowed mother. That’s what it looks like when technology remembers what it’s for.
Heavy social infrastructure. Light technology. A container, not a platform.
Abstraction doesn’t have to disembed, extract, and scale indefinitely. It can re-embed people into local relationships. This is rare, but it is possible. And we should study it closely.
Story in the comments by Pankaj Mishra from a couple of months ago. Gaurav Gupta EkStep Foundation
Originally written for LinkedIn on 1 December 2025. View original →
Gautam John 
Leave a comment