The turn of the year saw the "Disha Development Lab" transform from a concept into a fortress of innovation. Located in a discreet, purpose-built facility on the outskirts of the Dholera campus, it was a world within a world. Access required triple-layer biometric clearance, and the air inside was filtered and hummed with the sound of supercomputers running early versions of the "Sanskrit-2" processor. This was where the mind of India was being built, one line of code, one neural network at a time.
Harsh's role evolved once more. He was no longer the architect, nor the sovereign, but the bridge. His days were spent in a relentless shuttle between three worlds:
1. The Political World (Delhi): He sat on the steering committee for Project Disha, navigating the byzantine logic of government bureaucracy. He translated the grand vision of the PMO into actionable technical requirements for his team, while simultaneously managing the anxieties of ministers fearful of ceding too much control to an algorithm.
2. The Corporate World (Mumbai): He managed the expectations of his own CEOs. The massive resource drain of the Disha Lab was beginning to impact their own ambitious plans. Vikram needed more servers for his logistics AI. Deepak's "Sanskrit-2" team was stretched thin. Harsh had to constantly justify the long-term strategic sacrifice for this national mission.
3. The Lab (Dholera): Here, he was simply "Harsh," the visionary. He would spend hours with the lead data scientists and engineers, whiteboarding complex problems. How do you model the chaotic, human-driven system of Indian agriculture? How do you predict power demand in a city where a million new air conditioners could be plugged in during a single heatwave? These were challenges that fascinated the problem-solver in him, reconnecting him to the pure joy of creation he had felt in the Bhuleshwar alcove.
The first tangible output from the Lab was not a flashy AI, but a "Unified Data Ingestion Protocol." It was a monumental feat of software engineering—a system that could take in chaotic, unstructured data from thousands of different government sources (from port manifests scrawled in ledgers to digital power grid readings) and translate it into a clean, standardized format. It was the unglamorous, essential work of building the corpus for the national brain.
The first major test of this system came from an unexpected crisis. Unseasonal cyclonic storms were forming in the Bay of Bengal, threatening the eastern coast. The government's disaster management system was scrambling, relying on outdated models and fragmented reports.
The Disha Lab, still in its infancy, received a direct request from the PMO: "Run your models. Give us a better picture."
For 72 hours, the lab was a pressure cooker. They fed every byte of data they could access—satellite imagery, ocean temperature data, historical storm paths, real-time weather station reports—into their nascent predictive models.
The result was a map far more precise and dynamic than anything the government possessed. It predicted not just the storm's path, but its likely intensity at landfall, and, crucially, identified the specific coastal districts where the storm surge would be most devastating, based on tidal data and topography.
Evacuations were ordered with a new level of precision. Resources were pre-positioned exactly where they were needed. When the cyclone hit, the damage was severe, but the loss of life was a fraction of what historical models had predicted.
It was Disha's first, quiet victory. It had saved thousands of lives not with a grand AI pronouncement, but by doing something simple yet previously impossible: making the existing data talk, clearly and coherently.
The PM called Harsh personally. "Your 'pen' writes clearly, Mr. Patel. We will be ordering more ink."
The success was a powerful vindication. It silenced many of the internal critics within the government and the Patel Group. The mind of India was still primitive, but it had proven its worth. It had shown that it could feel the pulse of the nation, and in a moment of crisis, make its heartbeat a little stronger.
Harsh left the lab that night, exhausted but exhilarated. The bridge he was building was holding. He was connecting the slow, powerful will of the state with the agile, brilliant minds in his lab, and the result was saving lives. The pursuit of power had led him here, to a form of influence that was not about control, but about enablement. He was helping a nation learn to think, and in doing so, he was discovering a purpose that made all the wealth and stock market triumphs feel like a distant, insignificant prelude.