In order to provide ample space for innovation, India will regulate artificial intelligence with a light hand, following the model that saw the growth of IT services companies in the 1990s.
In an address to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)’s Global Economic Policy Forum on Thursday, S. Krishnan, secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity), stated that although the Union government acknowledges that there are significant obstacles to overcome in the development of AI in India, “the positives outweigh the negatives” in this field.
He cited a recent statement made by former IMF managing director Gita Gopinath, who claimed that AI might lead to a rise in productivity and economic transformation akin to that of the industrial revolution.
“We are interested in this possibility because, from India’s perspective, the government’s policy thinking on AI weighs more benefits than drawbacks,” Krishnan stated. “It is obvious that there are safety concerns, as deepfakes and misrepresentations have already been brought to light. These issues will require more careful attention in the days ahead.”
Regarding the December 12th Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) Summit in Delhi, Krishnan stated that increasing the number of Indian participants in the global alliance will be a major objective.
“Developed OECD nations dominate GPA, but how can the global south be included more fully in this? How might AI be transformed and applied to help greater numbers of people? This will be a key goal for us to strive for at the summit,” he declared.
In addition, he said, the Center will work to grow the current national AI programs, “primarily to cover what we can do in compute in conjunction with the world,” in addition to adopting a light-touch approach to regulation.
According to Krishnan, computation is one of the most significant obstacles facing the domestic development of AI.
Union minister of state for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar addressed this on October 13 and unveiled the Center’s “India AI” policy. A “datasets platform” was established to centrally aggregate and manage a data pool for Indic languages. Additionally, a second platform aimed at fostering the development of indigenous compute power through public-private partnerships was added.
Chandrasekhar stated on November 3rd that India, one of the 28 signatories to the Bletchley Declaration—the first worldwide collaborative agreement convened in the UK to collectively regulate AI—highlighted four primary concerns and areas of work.
Industry leaders have come to the consensus over time that international regulation of AI is necessary. The president of Microsoft, Brad Smith, stated to Mint on August 28 that guidelines for the global AI business may be established by a worldwide regulatory framework.
On September 28, Nick Clegg, head of global affairs at Meta, stated to Mint that a framework for AI research that is widely agreed upon is not just required but also “very much desirable.”
While data was readily available, Krishnan highlighted that the government has “taken positive steps in regulation of data, particularly through the DPDP Act,” underscoring important obstacles in AI development beyond computation.
The third component is skills, where India performs reasonably well internationally. That is also true for India’s overall readiness ranking, and we are among the best in the world when it comes to organizations adopting AI—we already have a leg up in all of this to build on,” he said.
The fourth area is research, where we collaborate with several research institutes in India and outside. We have the Global Partnership on AI Summit next week. GPAI now comprises 29 countries, with India serving as its chairperson. We intend to develop this further.”
In an effort to address prejudice, Krishnan continued, basic AI models created domestically in India using its own datasets would be more appropriate for industrial and national results.
However, there is another crucial factor: if we can train models in this manner in the long run, they will also be more appropriate for the rest of the global south. In this regard, we are working towards Bhashini and many other people,” he stated.
