Written by Sarosh Bana.
India is placing much worth on Artificial Intelligence (AI) becoming a kinetic enabler of its Digital India policies.
“India is clear that rather than demonising AI, our focus is on harnessing its potential for good,” said Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the eve of the three-day Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) 2023 summit in New Delhi last December. “Today, discussions around AI have transitioned from the abstract to tangible real-world applications that impact us all—and in a manner that ensures platforms are legally accountable for its safety and trust.”
Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar, whose Master’s thesis over 30 years ago was about AI and intelligent machines (robotics), notes that India’s ‘Sovereign AI Plan’ will hugely benefit the country’s digital economy and innovation ecosystem that have grown into a “vibrant, world-beating one” with over a 100,000 start-ups and 108-plus unicorns created in the last few years alone. He foresees India’s digital economy to account for 20 per cent of its GDP by 2026, up from 4.5 per cent in 2014 and 11 per cent at present.
“The government is designing a comprehensive mission, ‘India-AI’, which will play the role of a catalyst to ensure our goals of making the next decade full of technology opportunities, or ‘India Techade’,” remarks Chandrasekhar.
The Indian government has emphasised that its Sovereign AI Plan is not designed to compete against private sector AI actors. Recent reports, however, indicate a plan to organise and make available Indian data for the creation of AI models and public-private partnerships for the development of infrastructure to train and deploy AI in India and perhaps abroad as well.
Sovereign AI represents a significant shift in how nations approach technology in the age of AI, explains Tech policy advisor Pablo Chavez, who was Google Cloud VP in Government Affairs. “Much of this could be a positive development, especially if the US, its allies, and like-minded partners work together to shape the development of AI in a manner that encourages self-sufficiency, but discourages the creation of digital walls among allies and partners (a “big, shared yard with high fences” approach),” he points out.
Chavez maintains that the move to sovereign AI can risk further fragmentation of the global digital ecosystem, a risk exacerbated by recent digital trade policy moves made by the US Trade Representative. “That fragmentation can potentially heighten geopolitical tensions, as nations vie for technological superiority and AI competition among nation-states potentially leads to conflicts over intellectual property, trade disputes or even military confrontations in extreme cases,” he adds. It is thus crucial to have a global governance framework on the safety and trust of AI, given the ubiquitous and boundary-agnostic nature of the Internet and AI.
Artificial Intelligence has evolved dramatically over the last 12 to 18 months, with recent advancements in generative AI and the availability of sophisticated multi-billion parameter models bringing AI to real-life applications ranging from search to language translation.
In India, Prime Minister Modi’s recent address that featured real-time translation of his speech in the Hindi language into the south Indian Tamil language was shown to represent how far AI has come in a short time. AI is widely acknowledged as possibly the most significant invention of our times, and one that promises to be even more disruptive and transformational than the advent of the Internet.
The AI Age has been heralded by the emergence of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), AI computing power, large language models with pioneering work at companies like DeepMind, and Open AI and vast investments by Big-Tech companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla etc.
Together with its as-yet unfathomable benefits, there is also a growing discussion on the risks and harms of AI, and how to harness its power whilst ensuring that the harms are mitigated. “India reaffirms its commitment to harnessing technology, particularly AI, for the welfare of people, ensuring that nations of the Global South are not the last to reap its benefits,” says Modi.
Referring to the United States’ and the European Union’s AI-specific legislation, Chandrasekhar says that Europe’s approach is based inherently on regulation for the rights of the citizens, while the US approaches this from a point of regulation for markets. “Our approach in developing our own sovereign AI infrastructure will be a hybrid of both,” he remarks.
Addressing the FE.com’s Digifraud & Safety Summit 2023 last November, the Minister indicated: “We are determined that we must have our own sovereign AI. We can take two options. One is to say, as long as there is an AI ecosystem in India, whether that is driven by Google, Meta, Indian startups, and Indian companies, we should be happy about it. But we certainly don’t think that is enough.” He added that India had the opportunity to also have a model that was more sovereign and a lot more unique, like India DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure), comprising distinctive digital identification, a payments system, and a data exchange layer.
India’s Planning Commission, called NITI Aayog, sees the transformative nature of AI providing the country with an opportunity to define its own brand of AI leadership. The brand, #AIforAll, aims at inclusive technology leadership, where the full potential of AI is realised in pursuit of the country’s unique needs and aspirations. It cites this strategy striving to leverage AI for economic growth, social development and inclusive growth, and finally as a “garage” for emerging and developing economies.
“Technology disruptions like AI are once-in-a-generation phenomena, and hence large-scale adoption strategies, especially national strategies, need to strike a balance between narrow definitions of financial impact and the greater good,” notes NITI Aayog, which has decided to adapt this technology for the five sectors of Healthcare (increased access to and affordability of quality healthcare), Agriculture (enhanced farmers’ income, increased farm productivity and reduced wastage), Education (improved access and quality of education), Smart Cities and Infrastructure (connectivity for the burgeoning urban population), and Smart Mobility and Transportation (smarter and safer modes of transportation, and better traffic and congestion problems).
