It is an undisputed fact that Telanagana is the leader of AI technologies in India. While emerging technologies were something others were not even thinking of, Telangana prioritized it, especially AI, and that too mostly for governance, and social empowerment. The state has come up with a lot of projects, affecting the local citizen and even commemorated the year 2020 as the year of AI. And Mr. Jayesh Ranjan and Ms. Rama Devi Lanka are some of the pioneers of this success.

Rama Devi Lanka is the director of emerging technologies, in the state of Telangana. She holds back an experience of years and a diverse background. She had been to Silicon Valley, she has witnessed Google starting from scratch, and coexisted with technology since its early days. INDIAai's Content & Research Lead Jibu Elias caught up with Rama Devi Lanka to learn more about her AI journey and Telangana's.

Rama Devi's AI Journey

Remembering her professional journey, Rama Devi said, "My entire career is in technology and that made it easier for me to work in emerging technologies. I am a civil engineer who moved to Silicon Valley to work in startups. It was the time when Google had just set up its office. I used to drive past Google not knowing that one day it would become the biggest tech giant. I worked in a company called 'Be Vocal' where I worked on really high-end technologies like speech to voice recognition, and so on." 

"Then some family reasons flew me back to India and I joined the government again. However, owing to the lack of scope within the government at that time, I moved to similar organizations that used technologies to help governments. I worked for two years at Center for Good Governance, a state organization, and did some really amazing projects." 

"I then moved to the National Institute for Smart Government who was then headed by Mr. J. Satyanarayana. It was a wonderful organization where I got the opportunity to work with some important ministries within the government of India, including visa and immigration, healthcare, as well as the department of atomic energy. These were large projects that actually brought in sort of reforms within the particular sectors",she added. 

Remembering her initial days in the Telanagana government and the motivation behind this push towards AI, Rama Devi Lanka said, "Mr. Ranjan asked me to work on emerging technologies. I really didn't know where to start, there were no precedents. It was a new technology. I was lost for quite some time. Then I started thinking what next? It was a great opportunity as the government wanted me to work on this particular thing." 

"I was the sole person working on this, at that time with no team, limited funds, and so many constraints, and a new technology." But as they say, constraints help you in coming up quickly with solutions. I started doing my own research and then we actually identified eight emerging technologies that would really impact the way the government delivers services to citizens, businesses, etc.", she expressed. 

Talking of the team's perspective and strategy, she said "Our perspective was to leverage technologies like AI, blockchain, cloud, robotics, IoT, AR, VR, big data and so on for the government to either address certain pain points to improve service deliver or improve the internal governance processes." 

"But when we started thinking that, we realized that we needed an ecosystem, we needed companies to offer us those solutions and services. Then we started working on building that ecosystem. It was a two-point strategy. The first was to develop an ecosystem in the state for these technologies to thrive and second leverage these technologies for the government", Rama Devi mentioned.

The effort reaped fruits soon. What started as a one-man army with Rama Devi Lanka is now a full-fledged team that identifies the emerging technologies, structures its broad framework and foundational, pillars, and comes up with policy frameworks, or as they call them drones. The team takes up real-life projects and institutionalizes them. 

Using AI for Social Good

Talking of the recent projects and partnerships being worked on by the Telangana government, Rama Devi said, "One of the recent projects the team is working upon is developing a solution for facilitating people to vote from their homes in the coming elections. The one-of-its-kind projects could be rolled out in a month. The team has also grabbed some valuable AI partnerships to achieve certain deliverables to drive the AI ecosystem in the state."

"We also entered a partnership with Intel, that of applied AI in Hyderabad for healthcare and mobility. Another interesting partnership was with Wadhwani AI to work on AI projects, the current one being called 'Pest Management in Agriculture."

Talking about the major AI projects currently being deployed from the Telangana Technology Division, she said, "We have identified around five focus areas within the government – agriculture, education, healthcare, smart cities, and law enforcement mobility."

Talking of agriculture as a priority sector she added "Telangana has been a drought state, it is not rain-fed. So, the government built irrigation structures to help the farmers. But we realized that we really need to bring in some transformation, some technological innovations to help the farmers."

Agriculture - A priority sector

Shedding some light on the agricultural projects, she said, "We are working on some more than 12 use cases in agriculture. We have collaborated with the World Economic Forum and launched a new project called AI for AI. It's an amazing partnership between different stakeholders, governments, research institutions, industries, and civil societies. We have reached a milestone where the governments can actually look at our report, on the use cases and start implementing those."

"Another key project that we have now is with NASSCOM, where we have come up with a specific AI framework policy and identified around six pillars to curate innovative solutions across three agricultural areas. The first one is precision agriculture to check the wastage of natural resources, the second being price discovery and market linkages for the farmers, and the third credit lending."

"We are also working with the agriculture ministry to use emerging technologies for agriculture. For that, we have released and RPF only inviting startups for this. This is a unique thing done by the Telangana government, which no state has done, as far as I know", she added. 

Discussing further the third project, she said, "There are five solutions being targeted under the project namely using IoT sensors and other technologies for efficient use of nutrition and education, traceability of produce right from seed stage to the last mile, traceability quality, pension lifecycle, and chatbots."

The team has also taken up an interesting project in healthcare for Asha workers, with Wadhwani. "The Asha workers work at the village level. They visit each and every household to collect data on newborns. This data especially the weight data of babies are used to suggest nutrition and other interventions. However, the data is often manipulated leading to discrepancies."

To tackle the issue, a smartphone-based algorithm has been developed by Wadhwani. The algorithm, presented during AI raise event, is in the pilot phase and we are trying to scale it up", mentioned Rama Devi.

Envisioning the transformation in agriculture in the coming years with the current course of technology, she expressed "I think this is the right time and the right place for any startup company to enter into agritech because one, the government is really keen to use technology or to adopt technology to help companies develop solutions and second, the is farmers are willing to adopt the technology."

"Today even the VCs are interested to fund agritech projects. Earlier, this interest wasn't. Nobody was investing in agriculture. But Agritech has arrived at the right time at the right place, especially in India because in India, we really need technological solutions to transform agriculture", she added.

She pictures these expected transformations to double farmers' income and make agriculture an attractive profession for the youth. She looks forward to times when people will willingly move to agriculture, routed by technological advancements. 

Talking of the challenges she faced, Rama Devi said, "The first challenge was the ecosystem. We didn't have the right ecosystem in place and had to work really hard to bring different groups together so that the transfer of knowledge happens and solutions are developed. Another big challenge is the lack of awareness. We need to actually educate the farmers. It cannot be tech space, where you need to enter data, the solutions have to be visual or audio-based, where you give advisories in the local languages." 

"One more important challenge we faced while we entered agritech was the unavailability of data. We realized that data is available here and there, but it's not in a format that is amenable for machine learning, or, for AI algorithms. So number one, we had to actually identify the sources of data, which are spread in different departments, and number two, the startups had to carry out the preprocessing of data so that that that would be available for the AI algorithm. So a lot of effort has gone into this", she added. 

The team is now prioritizing the creation of data stacks including farmer records, soil cards, soil health, land records, etc. The digital data will be available for startups to come up with innovative solutions. This will also be applied to the health sector to create data sets for the health profile of individuals. 

Women in AI

As a leader in AI technology, she also vocalized her thoughts on the underrepresentation of women in technology and pressed on the need of having focused programs for women to encourage women and children right from the school age. She went on to shed some pieces of advice to children, school, school students, college students, and young professionals. 

"One thing I believe is, if you have that passion, really have the interest or the will to do something you can have it. There are certain disadvantages for women, you have to actually fight certain things but I don't think they really prevent you from achieving what you want. You have to actually be a strong-willed person to overcome all the hurdles this as an individual."

"One area that women are not so good at as compared to men is in networking, Please use networking, that's one area, which gives opens out a lot of doors for women entrepreneurs, or even for students, who are seeking out jobs."

She believes certain incentives or scholarships from the government also go a long way in facilitating girls' education. "There should be some flexibility in work owing to the family responsibilities of women. Also, children should be encouraged from a very young age to take up STEM programs. They don't have to specifically focus on AI alone, they can choose anything, programs or courses in technology", she concluded.

Watch the video of this interview here