Lalitha A R

Pausing iSRL: Respecting the work, supporters, and oneself

Building something as big as UPI for Food, a system that can make a food systems computable…accessible enough to help the mother in the village who wants to know if a food is safe for her child with peanut allergy, and large enough to help the ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition the F&B brands make better decisions at scale is not a small or easy thing.

It requires people with grit to do the work at every stage of the way without letting anything slip through, to craft policies to protect every good faith actor in the ecosystem without looking at it through a shaded lens or personal biases.

But, it is also not something that can be sustained without a government mandate or funding. I actually tried to see if we could make it work, maybe if we crowdsource across organizations and individuals, we could build it enough to show the impact and maybe the mandate will follow.

But the hardest part of this was proving the legitimacy of the work just because it isn’t from a well known institution and huge funders behind it, and the overhead of maintaining that image.

The allergen report (Food Allergens in India: Evidence, Regulation, and the State of Current Knowledge) was reviewed by one of the best immunologists in India - if there was someone who spent his career thinking what food allergies mean for India, it would be Dr. Mahesh PA of JSS Medical College. When we went through the draft, his review was “It has come out well. Very few comments”.

Our methodology for how we tackled 48,000+ rows of data to bring it down to 2192, with using AI as a constrained parser, independently converged with the methodology that Google Research used to tackle huge loads of flood data.

The EMF Tri Axial Model was inspired by S.R. Ranganathan’s 1933 Colon Classification, the first method as we know to be derived from a century of supreme court precedents, ITC-HSN and FSSAI rulesets. It is also the first method to do NOVA processing at ingredients level deterministically. (Identity, Transformation and Function: The E-M-F Tri-Axial Model)

Also, the first paper (and the second) to use the law sets and court cases as a timed dataset as Ground Truth in Emerging Domains, where established consensus of definitions and ontology hasn’t been established yet. (Regulatory Texts and Case Law as Ground Truth in Emerging Domains)

We were invited by both FSSAI & ICMR-NIN for a presentation of the project and how we can align further.

We produced 9 published works, including the Encyclopedia of Indian Food Ingredients, with 2 more in progress in the last 8 months.

The work produced undergraduate students who could go from ‘how to research’ to doing a multi jurisdiction analysis of what the law says. The ones that knows how to verify a source as primary, how to give credit to what matters and how to handle ambiguity in the span of 4 weeks.

Despite all of this, the first doubt wasn’t about a methodology we used, or how it can be generalized, but rather that of the legitimacy of the work and which huge institution is doing the work to deserve/receive support and funding.

The second doubt was, why is it not published in an international Q1 journal (Even if that would mean watering down the reports to fit the journal’s vision and to generalize it so it’s not ‘only for India’ but widely applicable. In a work, that is specifically for India.)

We are so grateful to the support from Thejesh GN, Anand S, Dr. Mahesh PA, Radhakrishnan MV, and all the contributors who helped through one way or another. Thank you.

We are also grateful for the grant of 50k INR through Nagarathna Memorial Grant by Foss United Foundation and Thejesh GN.

But, I have to pause iSRL here because we do not have the funds that is enough to sustain the effort required to build this project out to what it is, and still enough to fund the livelihood of the person working behind it.

I actually applied to Foss United Foundation again, but have come to realize stretching it beyond this would be a disrespect to the very principle all of this was built upon.

Ya Devi Sarva Bhuteshu Buddhi Roopena Samsthita, Namasthasyai Namo Namah - Devi Mahatmiyam

Salutations to the Goddess who dwells in all beings in the form of intelligence.

is what I said when I started this project, it is profound respect to every being, every actor in the ecosystem, and knowing every human being is worthy and intellect and deserving of all the goodness and love in the world beyond anything they did or didn’t do.

But to keep going would mean,

  1. Hope and convince Foss United to stretch the definition of what they fund, and the load of a national infrastructure shouldn’t fall on a non profit foundation, of whose adoption is uncertain because it’s not from the govt or a big institute, shouldn’t be asked to bear the financial weight of what’s a national effort. I deny to do that. I respect the FOSS ecosystem too much to do that.
  2. In every email, hope and convince that it’s indeed legit and feel bad about it because it’s not the compensation they deserve in exchange of contributing, and every supporter’s expertise and thoughts matter more than what we can offer. I deny to do that. I respect everyone who have supported the work too much to do that.
  3. Take the load of both the administrative overhead and the core research direction by myself and also do all the other roles that this work deserves by myself, and ignore myself or my family’s financial constraints and rest. I deny to do that too. I respect my people and myself too much to do that.
  4. All of it would mean, watering down the work of what it deserves, and that is a disrespect to the intelligence I bow to. I refuse to do that.

My goal, vision, and the data substrate that would make the food system legible and benefit everyone remains the same. My love and respect to my mother country’s rich heritage remains the same. But, I will not to water down the work or myself in the process to fit the constraints. Hence, iSRL is paused for now.

iSRL is in the belief of respecting the inherent intelligence within all of us, and respecting every one of us as deservable of all love and goodness regardless of anything we do or say or didn’t and I have to respect that intellect in me to know it’s exhausting and to respect the work enough to pause and let go.

Thank you to everyone who was a part of it.

Ya Devi Sarva Bhuteshu Buddhi Roopena Samsthita, Namasthasyai Namo Namah - Devi Mahatmiyam

Salutations to the Goddess who dwells in all beings in the form of intelligence.