The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, also known as MeitY, has been one of the most important executive agencies of the Government of India. Carved out of the then Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in 2016, MeitY acts as a standalone ministerial agency responsible for IT policy, strategy and development of the electronics industry. 

Since its inception, through various initiatives and subordinate agencies, from the National Informatics Centre, Unique Identification Authority of India, Digital India mission, Software Technology Parks of India, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, National E-Governance Division, to MyGov and DigiLocker, MeitY has become the flag bearer for the e-Development of India for transition its into a developed nation and empowered society.

With the rise of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, IoT, Robotics and Big Data, MeitY today lead the way to bring socio-economic empowerment and inclusion by leveraging these powerful technologies. To take advantage of this massive technological leap in AI for economic prosperity and to emerge as a global AI power, MeitY has introduced and implemented numerous programs and initiatives in 2020. Here are some of the AI initiatives from MeitY that impacted the lives of millions of Indians.

1. RAISE 2020

RAISE 2020 global virtual summit was India's flagship AI event, organised by MeitY. The event was held from October 5 to October 9, 2020, online. The RAISE 2020 summit was formulated to reiterate the country's commitment towards embracing Artificial Intelligence technologies, especially as a tool for economic empowerment and social inclusion. It also provided as a platform for the exchange of ideas that will help India accomplish over half a trillion-dollar in GDP growth in the next five years through AI. 

The summit was inaugurated by the Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi. It consisted of 48 sessions of 85 hours with 320 high-quality keynote speakers and panellists from 21 countries. The summit also featured many leading personalities in global AI space such as IBM CEO Aravind Krishna, Turing Award Winner Dr Rar Reddy and Nige Wilson, with dozens of public, private and non-governmental organisations partnering. These sessions covered many critical topics such as responsible AI, governance of AI, education and skilling, data market, the role of NLP in bridging language barriers, the role of AI in healthcare, global partnerships and many more. The summit also featured key AI developments from many of the government departments such as C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) and NIC (National Informatics Centre), as well as states such as Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. 

In terms of audience, the event had close to eighty-thousand registrations from 147 countries, with close to forty thousand participating directly through the virtual event platform and many more attending the event through social media streaming. The scale and quality of RAISE 2020 were unprecedented for any other AI virtual summit. It not only established the brand India in the global AI space but also showed the world that technologies matter only when it used to empower the people.

2. Aatmanirbhar AI Solutions Challenge

The AI Solution Challenge was organised for Indian startups in Artificial Intelligence as part of RAISE 2020. The Challenge saw participation from 299 startups, out of which top startups were selected for Start-up Pitch Fest during RAISE 2020. The winners included 15 startups spanning across six categories: healthcare, agriculture, education, NLP, mobility, and others. 

The AI Startup Pitch Fest, hosted by Shraddha Sharma, founder of YourStory, had an eminent panel consisting of MeitY secretary Ajay Sawhney, Special Secretary and Financial Advisor to MeitY Jyoti Arora, NegD and Digital India CEO Abhishek Singh, and Atal Innovation Mission Director R. Ramanan. The Startup Pitch Fest featured many notable names in India's AI ecosystem, including Haptik, Embibe, SigTuple, Uncanny Vision and Intello Labs. 

3. Responsible AI for Youth

With an objective to empower the youth to become AI-ready and help reduce the skill gap, National e-Governance Division of MeitY and Intel India launched a Responsible AI for Youth program. The key objective of this program is to give young Indian students a platform and to empower them with appropriate new age tech mindset, relevant skill-sets and access to required tool-sets to make them digitally ready for the future. The program also aims to demystify AI for youth and equip them with the skill sets and the mindset required for AI readiness, as well as to democratise access to AI tools and train youth to use them skillfully. The program is open to students from Government Schools based in District Headquarters; classes 8 – 12 across the country, and it will be implemented in a phase-wise manner.

4. MyGov Corona Helpdesk

With misinformation and fake news being circulated on social media about the COVID pandemic, MyGov-the country’s citizen engagement platform, along with the Ministry of Health in collaboration with Haptik launched MyGov Corona Helpdesk chatbot. The goal of this chatbot is to bring awareness and get the nation prepared to combat COVID 19. The AI-enabled ‘MyGov Corona Helpdesk’ has also bagged two awards under two categories “Best Innovation for Covid-19 – Society” and “People’s Choice Covid-19 Overall Winner”, at the CogX 2020, which is a prestigious Global Leadership Summit and Festival of AI & Emerging Technology held annually in London.

5. MyGov Saathi Chatbot

With the country in the midst of COVID-19, Digital India in collaboration with Accenture and Microsoft launched a chatbot named MyGov Saathi, to enable citizen communication. The bot uses AI and natural language processing to understand customer questions and provide appropriate responses. The bot doesn’t just give short answers to questions—it directs residents to webpages with comprehensive information. Initially, the bot started in English, and now MyGov and Digital India have expanded the bot to Hindi and other regional languages so that it can reach more citizens in a personal, direct way. Currently, the bot has around 250,000 monthly users, and daily active sessions range from a few hundred to a few thousand, with total active sessions over a 16-day period nearing 600,000.

6. PARAM SIDDHI AI

On October 2020, C-DAC commissioned India’s largest HPC-AI supercomputer ‘PARAM SIDDHI AI. On November 2020, PARAM SIDDHI AI, India’s fastest and largest supercomputer, was ranked #63 in the TOP500 Supercomputing list. PARAM SIDDHI AI, a machine with 210 AI Petaflops (6.5 Petaflops Peak DP), is based on the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD reference architecture comprising of 42 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, connected with NVIDIA Mellanox HDR InfiniBand networking along with indigenously developed HPC-AI engine, software frameworks, cloud platform by C-DAC. Atos is the integration partner, providing the Atos Codex AI Suite to deliver real-time analytics and support AI application development.

7. INDIAai

On May 2020, MeitY in collaboration with NeGD and NASSCOM launched INDIAai- The National AI Portal of India. The portal operates as a one-stop digital platform for AI-related developments in India, sharing of resources such as articles, startups, investment funds in AI, resources, companies and educational institutions related to AI in India. The portal also highlights documents, case studies, research reports, learning opportunities, AI standards and new job roles related to AI. The national AI portal-INDIAai is designed to act as the central point to create and nurture a unified AI ecosystem in the country, as well to drive excellence and leadership in India's knowledge, creation, and use of artificial intelligence to foster economic growth and improve the lives of Indians.