TEST:Govt to spend $200 million on AI, build better e-governance apps

Indian programme has diverse collections of datasets of citizens from all parts of the country, says Rajeev Chandrasekhar in reference to avoiding AI bias

India will spend some $200 million to develop an Artificial Intelligent (AI) ecosystem that will make e-governance platforms more accessible, said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, at the Business Standard TechTalk in Bengaluru.

The country will prioritise using AI for governance applications on India Stack, language model Digital India Bhashini, and healthcare. It will encourage the private sector and start-ups to develop AI use cases, said Chandrasekhar on Friday.

India Stack comprises open-source software application programming interfaces (APIs) of government-backed services such as Aadhaar, unified payment interface (UPI), and DigiLocker. The open-source model has a plethora of computer languages, architecture, APIs, libraries or lexicons, user interfaces, and the apps themselves.

“We will bring in learning and intelligence into that stack, which will sit on all these huge amounts of data we have about consumer behaviour and what citizens are consuming,” said Chandrasekhar, adding that AI will take the duplication and fraudulent use of subsidies to almost zero.

The government will create guardrails for emerging technologies like AI. “I can share with you one of the big areas the new Digital India Act, which will be replacing IT Act, 2000, will be the framework of guardrails for ethical use without disrupting innovation,” he said, referring to legislation proposing to regulate the country’s fast-growing digital market.

Under its IndiaAI programme, the government has conducted consultations with industry stakeholders for launching a datasets programme. The huge datasets held by the government, when organised and made available in a curated form, will become a game changer for the AI ecosystem in the country.