Google has announced a $1 million grant to IIT Madras to set up a first-of-its-kind multi-disciplinary Center for Responsible AI to conduct research on various aspects of bias in AI, especially from an Indian context. 

google.org will offer a similar sum to independent non-profit Wadhwani AI to develop efforts to deploy AI models that help with ‘crop disease monitoring predicting yield outcomes, and bringing efficiencies to Kisan call centers. 

The company also announced its move to contribute to the agri stack defined by the Government of India with a combination of remote sensing and AI to tackle problems arising in agriculture in a scalable manner. Manish Gupta, Director of Google Research India, in a conversation with Indian Express, stated that Google would apply its AI models over satellite images to identify things like farm boundaries and locations of the farms. It will also develop an understanding of the agricultural landscape.  

Google has already started a pilot project with the Telangana government and has been working with a few startups. The company aims to detect specific activities like sowing, harvesting and even stubble burning, relying on imagery over a period of time. Alongside this, the team is also improving its earlier model for Indic languages by expanding it to as many as a hundred languages where it can understand text and speech. They collaborated with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), where their team will aim to collect anonymised speech data from people across 773 districts, while reflecting diversity in gender and age, across a range of educational and socio-economic backgrounds. 

Google has also launched a a state-of-the-art AI and machine learning model that can identify and even highlight medicines within handwritten prescriptions. This will act as an assistive technology for digitizing handwritten medical documents by augmenting the humans in the loop such as pharmacists, however no decision will be made solely based on the output provided by this technology.