India's AI programme to help achieve the goal of $1 trillion digital economy: IT Minister

The government has come up with a report on the country's artificial intelligence programme and the government believes that it will be an enabler for India to reach the goal of a USD 1 trillion digital economy by 2026.

According to Minister of Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the draft National Strategy on Robotics will be part of the multi-year India AI programme.

"This is a deep, multi-year roadmap to make Indian AI work for being a kinetic enabler of the trillion dollar digital economy," Chandrasekhar said. Earlier, the minister said that by 2026, the government has plans to make India a USD 1-trillion digital economy.

Apart from supporting the startup ecosystem, the programme will also focus on comprehensive skills in the country, building computer infrastructure etc.

The report recommends creation of India data sets platform to be used by domestic startups and researchers, building GPU (graphical processing unit)-based computer infrastructure to provide resources for development of AI engines or models to indigenous firms.

"India AI computer platform will be a PPP (public private partnership) project that will create substantial GPU capacity for our startups and researchers to train their models," Chandrasekhar said.

He said India data sets will be a collection of data and may be one of the largest collections of anonymised data sets, which will be used by Indian researchers and Indian startups to train their model.

"Indian AI will also support development of AI chips in partnership with the Semicon India Program," Chandrasekhar said.

The Ministry of Electronics and IT has floated a consultation paper on the National Strategy on Robotics, which is open for public comments till October 31.