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NEW DELHI — As artificial intelligence (AI) begins to percolate across industries amid privacy concerns, the Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has approved the comprehensive national-level IndiaAI Mission with a budget outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore.
By democratising computing access, improving data quality, developing indigenous AI capabilities, attracting top AI talent, enabling industry collaboration, providing startup risk capital, ensuring socially impactful AI projects and bolstering ethical AI, the mission will drive responsible, inclusive growth of India's AI ecosystem.
The mission will be implemented by ‘IndiaAI’ Independent Business Division (IBD) under Digital India Corporation (DIC), said the IT Ministry.
Let us see what the mission with seven key initiatives will offer.
Recognising the need for adequate guardrails, the safe and trusted AI pillar will enable the implementation of 'Responsible AI’ projects including the development of indigenous tools and frameworks, self-assessment checklists for innovators, and other guidelines and governance frameworks.
The ‘FutureSkills’ initiative is conceptualised to mitigate barriers to entry into AI programmes and will increase AI courses in undergraduate, masters-level, and PhD programmes.
Data and AI labs will be set-up in tier 2 and 3 cities across the country to impart foundational-level courses, said the ministry.
The IndiaAI compute pillar will build a high-end scalable AI computing ecosystem to cater to the increasing demands from India’s rapidly expanding AI startups and research ecosystem.
The ecosystem will comprise AI compute infrastructure of 10,000 or more Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), built through public-private partnership.
“An AI marketplace will be designed to offer AI as a service and pre-trained models to AI innovators. It will act as a one-stop solution for resources critical for AI innovation,” according to the Ministry of Electronics and IT.
The next component is the IndiaAI Innovation Centre that will undertake the development and deployment of indigenous Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and domain-specific foundational models in critical sectors.
Another key aspect of the mission is the IndiaAI Datasets Platform which will streamline access to quality non-personal datasets for AI Innovation. A unified data platform will be developed to provide a one-stop solution for seamless access to non-personal datasets to Indian Startups and Researchers.
The IndiaAI Application Development Initiative will promote the AI applications in critical sectors for the problem statements sourced from Central Ministries, State Departments, and other institutions.
“The initiative will focus on developing/scaling/promoting adoption of impactful AI solutions with potential for catalysing large scale socio-economic transformation,” said the ministry.
Last but not the least, the ‘IndiaAI Startup Financing’ pillar is conceptualised to support and accelerate deep-tech AI startups and provide them streamlined access to funding to enable futuristic AI Projects, said the government.