Seven working groups of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) submitted the first edition of IndiaAI report. The report was officially handed over to Shri Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union Minister of State for Skill Development & Entrepreneurship and Electronics & IT. He expressed that this report is set to serve as India’s guiding roadmap for the development of its AI ecosystem.

MoS Rajeev Chandrasekhar stated that, “After months of dedicated research, the seven working groups that were constituted to build the core goals of the IndiaAI program, have submitted their formal. This comprehensive report lays out what will be the fulcrum of the IndiaAI strategy that was envisaged by PM Modi. He had talked about India for AI and AI for India. Through this roadmap IndiaAI will work to be a kinetic enabler of the 1 trillion dollar digital economy.

According to the report, AI will be the kinetic enabler of India’s digital economy and make Governance smarter and more data-led. AI is expected to add USD 967 billion to the Indian economy by 2035 and USD 450–500 billion to India’s GDP by 2025, accounting for 10% of the country’s USD 5 trillion GDP target. AI has become a top priority on policy agendas worldwide, as it has the power to foster innovation, generate employment opportunities, and contribute to the growth of the country.

IndiaAI has a mission-centric approach that ensures a precise and cohesive strategy to bridge the gaps in the existing AI ecosystem viz-a-viz Compute infrastructure, Data, AI financing, Research and Innovation, targeted Skilling, and institutional capacity for Data to maximize the potential of AI to advance India's progress.

Furthering our commitment to building AI in India and for India, MeitY has set up seven working groups to collectively brainstorm on the vision, objectives, outcomes, and design for each of IndiaAI pillars.

After months of deliberative and collective brainstorming, the working groups have studied & shared their report on the following aspects of AI:

• IndiaAI Centres of Excellences (CoE)
• India Dataset Platform (IDP)
• Institutional Capacity and Design of National Data Management Office (NDMO)
• IndiaAI Future Design
• IndiaAI Futureskills
• IndiaAI Future Labs Compute
• Semicon IndiaAI chipsets

A peek into the report

The objectives of IndiaAI CoEs is to create a world-class AI ecosystem that pushes the frontiers of AI knowledge creation and innovation in collaboration with industry, national and international academia, start-ups, etc. The CoEs seek to enable knowledge creation, knowledge exchange and capacity building to a new generation of researchers, innovators, and entrepreneurs along with promoting collaboration among Indian and global academia, industry, and research entities.

Datasets are structured collections of data that are organized and presented in a specific format or structure. They consist of individual data points or records that are related to a particular subject or domain. Datasets can include various types of data, such as numerical, textual, categorical, or multimedia data. The IDP will play a crucial role in boosting the AI ecosystem in India by providing a robust foundation for data-driven innovation and development. IDP will provide access to diverse and quality datasets, it will facilitate data collaboration, enabling data-driven AI models, accelerating AI research and development and enabling governments to become data-driven organizations.

For institutionalizing NDMO, the executive office of the NDMO will be set up with an official gazette notification under Article 73 on the lines of the executive Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) and executive Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). Both these regulators were established as executive agencies even before the PFRDA and SEBI Acts were passed. The same legal power will be exercised here.

IndiaAI Future Design seeks to enhance the outcome of the MeitY scheme by providing the maximum support to the growing AI startup ecosystem. The startup ecosystem is comprised of various stakeholders that play a vital role in fostering the growth and achieving the success. The AI Startup ecosystem comprises industry, government institutions, academia, international partners/ecosystems, investors, etc., it is critically important to involve all of them proactively to support the overall ecosystem development. With the vision to build the next 100 AI Unicorns in the country, India AI is envisaged as an umbrella program to catalyze the AI innovation ecosystem in the Country. To realize the vision of "Make AI in India and Make AI work for India", funding mechanisms for AI innovation need to be explored.

As AI is becoming increasingly integrated into various industries, there is a growing demand for workers with AI-related skills. This has led to the need for upskilling and reskilling programs to help workers adapt to the changing skill requirements in AI. Additionally, the development of AI-enabled education platforms and the integration of AI into formal training programs are becoming essential to prepare professionals for the jobs of the future.

Keeping these aspects in view, IndiaAI Futureskills has reviewed various existing AI based curriculum and has emphasized a model curriculum framework involving K12 interventions, Graduate/Post Graduate level interventions, AI based research along with competency/ design considerations.

According to the report, India has witnessed significant growth in its AI compute infrastructure in recent years. Several leading technology companies, research institutions, and startups have established data centers and computing clusters equipped with high- performance computing resources. Major cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, offer AI-specific services and computing instances tailored for machine learning and deep learning workloads. Additionally, India has also witnessed the emergence of specialized AI startups and research labs focused on developing AI compute solutions.

The report also looks into the design approaches for AI chipsets, application areas for AI chipsets criteria for assessing the AI hardware requirement in HPC systems, and presents recommendations for AI chipsets for high-performance compute (HPC) and related areas.

Conclusion

The working groups detailed out the operational aspects of establishing Centers of Excellence (CoEs), and the institutional framework on governing data collection, management, processing and storage by the National Data Management Office (NDMO). The report also has recommendations on how India can leverage its demographic dividend and play to its strengths as an IT superpower to further the penetration of AI skills in the country, strengthening of the AI compute infrastructure in India to support the AI innovation through public-private partnerships (PPPs). 

The objective of this exercise was to undertake a comprehensive study of all the pillars of IndiaAI and to identify tangible next action items that need to be worked on to achieve the goal of “AI for all”.

Read the full report here.

Source:

IndiaAI report.

PIB