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The National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence (NSAI) puts AI at the forefront of Indian government initiatives, highlighting its potential to improve outcomes in areas such as healthcare, agriculture and education.
The role of AI in expanding the delivery of professional services (e.g., remote diagnosis and precision agriculture consultation) and enhancing inclusive access to government welfare services (e.g., regional language chatbots and voice interfaces) provides avenues for government intervention in these areas.
Furthermore, NSAI emphasizes the need to build a strong ecosystem that can foster cutting-edge research to solve societal problems and serve as a testing ground for AI innovations, while enabling India to assume a strategic global leadership role by scaling these solutions globally.
- Safety and reliability principles: AI deployment should follow its intended purpose and take robust measures to ensure the safety of relevant stakeholders. Efforts should focus on minimizing risks for all parties involved, and there should be mechanisms in place to handle dissatisfaction, provide care, and provide compensation in the event of accidental or unintentional harm. Continuous monitoring of AI systems throughout their lifecycle is key to ensure that their consistency and reliability performance is consistent with the intended goals.
- Equality principle: AI systems should ensure equal treatment of individuals in similar decision-making situations.
- Inclusion and non-discrimination: AI systems must not discriminate against qualified individuals based on their identity. They should avoid exacerbating divisions related to religion, race, class, gender, ancestry, place of origin or residence, especially in areas such as education, employment and access to public spaces. AI systems should actively prevent unfair exclusion of individuals from services or benefits. In the event of adverse decisions, affordable and accessible redress mechanisms should be provided to all, regardless of background.
- Privacy and security principles: AI must maintain the privacy and security of data about individuals or entities used to train the system. Access should be granted only to authorized individuals, and robust protections should be implemented.
- Transparency: The design and operation of AI systems should be documented and, to the greatest extent possible, available for external scrutiny and audit. This ensures fairness, transparency, and accountability in deployment.
- Responsibility principle: Everyone who creates, develops, and implements AI systems should be accountable for their actions. These stakeholders should conduct risk and impact assessments to measure the direct and indirect impacts of AI systems on end users. They should establish internal audit processes and, if necessary, external audits to ensure compliance with these principles and establish mechanisms to handle dissatisfaction in the event of any negative consequences.
- The principle of protecting and enhancing positive human values: Artificial intelligence must uphold positive human values and should not undermine social harmony.
Main Participants
Private sector investment in India totaled $7.73 billion over the past decade, with nearly 40% of that funding concentrated in 2022. Growth in venture capital investments increased by 129% from 2021 to 2022 to $2.26 billion.
Total funding for AI-based startups reached $5.1 billion in 2022, up from $870 million in 2018. The data shows that the private sector is thriving in the field of AI, especially in the growth of startups, with companies like VerSe, Uniphore, and Fractal receiving significant funding in 2022.
In 2023, IT giant Wipro announced that it would invest $1 billion to enhance its artificial intelligence capabilities, with the goal of achieving them by 2026.
To create a healthy ecosystem to ensure the development of AI in the country, the Indian government has launched several initiatives to support R&D and encourage investments in the sector.
The National Informatics Centre (NIC) provides cloud-based platforms to facilitate AI services such as AI-Manthan, which focuses on deep learning models and is applicable to chatbots and voice services, and AI-Satyapikaanan, which is optimized for biometric technologies such as facial recognition.
The National Artificial Intelligence Portal and the National Artificial Intelligence Mission were established to encourage the development and adoption of AI nationwide. The MeitY Startup Center and the National e-Government Initiative are aimed at further promoting the development of information technology.
The Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) was established in 2014 to focus on R&D in AI, robotics and networking. Three Centres of Excellence (CoEs) for AI were announced in the 2023 Budget. These centres will be set up in top educational institutions and will allow leading industry players to collaborate on interdisciplinary research in areas such as agriculture, health and sustainable cities. Simultaneously, the announcement of the AI India initiative will also see the launch of an AI platform with one of the world’s largest publicly available datasets, direct access to which will be limited to startups in the country.
Non-state actors are also increasingly adopting and deploying AI for malicious purposes. For example, the terrorist groups Turks and Turks and Muslims Movement (TMI) used deep fake videos and images to incite violence during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown. In 2021, a double bombing occurred at the Indian Air Force base in Jammu, which was carried out with the assistance of drones; investigations revealed the involvement of the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
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