While the global community is captivated by AI chatbots, Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar envisions to make India a global powerhouse of AI, going beyond mere integration of foreign chatbots and developing advanced AI-based solutions to empower billions of citizens.
Chandrasekhar told IANS that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a “kinetic enabler” of the digital economy and that the government will continue infusing this disruptive technology into India Stack’.
“AI will transform the digital economy in India and help to grow the country’s business economy,” Chandrasekhar stated. He emphasized that we are launching an extensive program called the IndiaAI Program. You will see more AI use cases via the India stack — Aadhaar and Unified Payments Interfaces (UPI), DigiLocker and CoWIN, and many more.”
This week, Chandrasekhar had a great conversation with Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder.
In the Union Budget for FY24, the government announced that it would open three centers of excellence in artificial intelligence (AI) at top educational institutions to help realize the visions of “Make AI in India” & “Make AI Work For India.”
Chandrasekhar said the government will expand the IndiaAI initiative with partners, such as homegrown startups, tech companies, and academic institutions, under an extensive AI program.
The IT Ministry’s Bhashini team is focused on creating a National Public Digital Platform that harnesses the capabilities of AI and other cutting-edge technologies to design citizen-centric services and products across various languages.
It creates a unifying architecture based on open data and open-source software principles to allow contributions from the ecosystem and research initiatives.
Chandrasekhar, who had a long and successful career in technology before he entered politics, said that Bhashini, the natural-language AI platform, “will allow automated language translation.”
He believes that India Stack will be more sophisticated, intelligent, and nuanced in its next avatar as more global countries and enterprises innovate, integrate, execute, or implement digital transformation.
Minister said that India Stack is part of India’s mission to provide India Stack to countries and enterprises worldwide looking to invent and integrate, execute, and implement digital transformation.
According to a Nasscom report, India is currently ranked first regarding AI skill penetration and talent concentration. It also ranks fifth in AI scientific publications.
The ‘AI Skills Penetration Factor in India’ is reported at 3.09, the highest among all G20 countries and OECD.
More than 1,900 AI-focused startups in India offer innovative solutions, mostly in the areas of NLP, conversational AI, and disease detection.
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