India to spend $200 million on AI to build e-governance system: MoS Electronics & IT

Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar has said that India will spend some $200 million to develop an Artificial Intelligent eco-system. The AI system will be used to make e-governance systems more accessible. This he said at the Business Standard TechTalk in Bengaluru.

"The country will prioritise using AI for governance applications on India Stack, language model Digital India Bhashini, and healthcare. It will encourage the private sector and start-ups to develop AI use cases", said Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

India Stack contains open-source software application programming interfaces of services that are backed by the government. Services that come under India Stack are Aadhaar, UPI and digilocker.

The minister also talked about creating guardrails for technologies like AI. He said that the new Digital India Act, will be the framework of guardrails for ethical use without disrupting innovation. The new Digital India Act will be replacing IT Act, 2000

As per Business Standard, under its IndiaAI programme, the government has conducted consultations with industry stakeholders for launching a datasets programme. The huge datasets held by the government, when organised and made available in a curated form, will become a game changer for the AI ecosystem in the country.

The Union Budget also had special provisions for Artificial Intelligence. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that there will be 3 centres of excellence for AI. This will be connected with academic researchers, the industry and start-ups