March 1691

In the blink of an eye, nearly a year has passed.

A lot of changes took place in the empire. The Pragathi engine continued to seep into every aspect of society; new machines, new inventions, and new tools continued to appear like bamboo shoots after rain.

Across the six and a half million square kilometres of the Bharatiya Empire, nearly every factory now uses Pragathi engine-powered pumps, conveyor belts, mixers, and other auxiliary machines. These were previously either driven directly by the Kesari Engine, which wasted a great deal of energy, or operated manually, which caused the usual inefficiencies of human labour. The shift to Pragathi engines has greatly improved the overall efficiency of the factories.

The steam-driven phonograph immediately became popular among the elites and high-class individuals of the empire, and it even led to the creation of the music industry. Over the last two months, nearly 4000 cylinders of recorded audio from famous singers were sold across the empire. Although it does not look like a lot, it is proof that a new industry has taken shape.

The power cycle, renamed "bike" by Parvati Iron and Steel, could now be seen in all major cities from time to time, along with steam-powered tricycles hauling delivery goods. Recognising the rapid evolution of transportation, the Department of Posts under the Ministry of Communications continued to modernise its services. Postmen no longer relied solely on bicycles; they now used bikes and tricycles as well. Logistic companies across the empire also began integrating this new technology into their distribution networks.

Top logistics companies in the empire, like the VRL Logistics or Brown Logistics, integrating their seafaring logistic capabilities, locomotive logistic capabilities, and local logistic capabilities, formed an extremely comprehensive and reliable delivery framework, pushing their values in the stock exchange to over a billion in one single step.

The industrial arteries and organs of the empire, the iron and steel zone in Gangapuri, the coal zone in Kalachuri Nagar, the rubber zone in Ahom, and the vast mining zones in Balochistan, Tibet, Prathiara Puri, and Kalsa Nagari, along with other SEZs across the empire, were like beasts awakened from slumber. They devoured resources relentlessly, driven by thousands of pounding steam hearts, and produced thousands of tonnes of industrial goods every single day.

As more cars were manufactured, the prices fell, so much so that even a slightly richer middle-class family could easily afford one. The same went for tractors, bikes, tricycles, and locomotives. More steam-powered vehicles have been put into service in the last six months than the entire number of vehicles combined in the years before that.

This naturally sparked a wave of modernisation across both the private and public sectors. The private sector was the first to adopt new technologies rapidly, but since the Bharatiya Empire functioned as a centralised society, all ministries soon followed under directives issued from the Prime Minister's Office to modernise their own ministries.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs, after consulting with central government statistics, decided to purchase hundreds of thousands of cars for the police force. The Ministry of Defence allocated 200 million Varaha to the military logistics department for buying cars and tractors. The Ministry of Transportation began using cars fitted with rail wheels for railway maintenance. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health ordered every hospital across the empire to equip its emergency ward with at least one car to serve as an ambulance, and in collaboration with the Ministry of Standards, made it a requirement for hospital certification.

In the midst of all this, Vijay received the sweet news of consecutive breakthroughs in the development of the new generation of the Kesari Engine, the new generation of the Bhairavi engine, and the new generation of the Bhalwan engine.

Vijay was overjoyed because now he could possibly manufacture vehicles of more variety to be built, like a digger, a truck, a bus, a faster car, or a tractor, which could now attach components too.

From now on, factories could power many more machines with the same engine. The productivity would increase, and the cost of industrial products would further reduce.

He could also finally develop a military-grade full-metal naval ship, which could be used as the new flagship of the Bharatiya Navy.

So many exciting possibilities really made him ecstatic, and when he received a report from the Binoy Research Institute, he was so happy that he could not control his emotions. In the end, in order to calm himself down, he had to get out of the palace for a few moments before he came back and ordered his general manager,

"Let's make the first-generation Bhalwan engine public. Let the private manufacturers buy the Patents and manufacture the parts."

Bhaskara Chariya was surprised. What made His Majesty make this decision all of a sudden? But he kept his doubts in his heart and did not think of inquiring, "As you wish, Your Majesty."

After Bhaskara Chariya left, Vijay couldn't help but read the report once again, and his heart, which had calmed down, began to race.

He couldn't help it. The news he read in the report was really astonishing. Anand Binoy, the boy he met and recruited for his discovery of electricity, actually discovered the electron.

The freaking electron, the same thing which J.J. Thomson discovered in 1897, the late 19th century, 200 years apart. Vijay usually looked into the reports submitted by Binoy every once in a while, maybe once or twice a month, and his impression of Anand was that he had taken a wrong route, because the way Michael Faraday built the first electromagnetic generator that produced a continuous electric current in 1831 was after he had understood and observed the relationship between magnetism and electricity.

Anand Binoy was actually on the same path, so Vijay thought that he would complete the research in five years, or maybe ten, but who would have thought, right in the middle of the research, he had taken a completely different route and dived deeper and deeper into the subatomic level, trying to figure out what even is current and how it works.

Vijay immediately realised that it was a lost cause, but he did not remind Anand that he was going in the wrong direction, because honestly, the technology tree of the Bharatiya Empire is quite crooked. Even though he had tried his best to improve the empire's technology as comprehensively as possible, in some areas it is still at the 17th or 18th century, while in others it is already at the 19th or 20th century.

He was not in a hurry to electrify the empire, especially not when they were still at the early stages of the industrial age, and the research on combustion engines had not even started. But who would have thought that, by his relentless persistence, he actually managed to discover the electron?

Thinking back, Binoy's journey in complete solitude with only a group of genius researchers was nothing short of legendary. For the last two and a half decades, he had been extremely consistent, with at least two or sometimes even three high-quality theses made every year. By the time it came to 1690, he had already made over a hundred and four discoveries when it came to magnetism, electricity, and some related fields in physics.

But this year, though it was only a few months in, he had already written twenty theses, each one uncovering a new aspect of the electron. Some of them included:

The electron as the fundamental unit of electricity, definitive proof that all electric current is the flow of electrons, the electron theory of metallic conduction, the presence of electrons as constituent parts of all Khanda's, the application of electron flow principles in redesigning the generator, and the electron theory of electromagnetic induction, among others.

It is set in stone that in at most a few years, the Bharatiya Empire will have a working electromagnetic generator capable of converting circular motion into electrical current.

"Did the empire just skip the later Industrial Revolution and directly enter the Second Industrial Revolution?" Vijay was confused. He did not know if it was a good thing or a bad thing, but in the end, he could only go with the flow.

The amazement Vijay felt at the empire's transformation was not shared by its people. Much like those born after 1995 in the 21st century, who rarely find anything surprising because technology evolves too quickly, the citizens of the 17th-century Bharatiya Empire had grown used to rapid change.

They were born into an age where innovation never stopped. Yesterday, one had to climb stairs to reach the top of a building. Today, a new invention called the elevator, powered by steam, lifts people effortlessly to higher floors. For them, constant change had become the new normal. Even those who struggled to keep up had no choice but to accept and adapt to the world moving forward around them.

However, if there was something the entire empire was excited about, then it was one single event, and that was the announcement of the athletes who would represent the Bharatiya Empire in the upcoming Olympics. The selection process had been underway for over a year, and at last, the Olympic Committee released an official statement declaring that the athletes had been finalised.

The Selection Committee, a new department created by Vijay himself under the Ministry of Sports, was responsible for this massive task. It consisted of retired or highly decorated former athletes, chosen for their experience and expertise in evaluating talent.

For team events, the committee picked the best players from the national league games to form Team Bharat. For individual sports, the top performers from state championships and Aikyotsava competitions were shortlisted and selected to represent the empire on the global stage.

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