India must catch up and leapfrog in AI: Abhishek Singh of MeitY & India AI Mission

Mumbai, Dec 3 (IANS) India is preparing to pull AI into the core of its digital public infrastructure, a shift that Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and CEO of the India AI Mission, said is becoming urgent as the country’s AI usage rises faster than its capacity to build domestic systems. 

The move comes amid growing concerns that foreign AI platforms are training on Indian data at a massive scale, potentially shaping essential services that millions of citizens will rely on.

Speaking at the Mint All About AI Tech4Good Awards, Singh told industry leaders and policymakers that India’s digital public infrastructure has already reshaped governance but now needs an AI layer to reach the last mile.

“We have shown what technology can do for good governance,” he said, adding, “The next step is to ensure AI makes these services accessible in every Indian language.” The government’s push is anchored in a voice-driven approach.

Singh said citizens should be able to access public services through simple, spoken queries rather than navigating apps or websites. Farmers could receive crop advice through a toll-free line in their mother tongue. Parents in rural districts could obtain basic medical information without traveling to a clinic. Students without qualified teachers could supplement their learning with adaptive AI tutors.

Singh said such services require models built on Indian data and trained to understand India’s linguistic and cultural context. “Human oversight is essential,” he said. “Models can hallucinate or mislead. We must build responsibly, and we must build for India.”

A central concern is India’s compute shortage. While global companies move toward multi-gigawatt GPU clusters, India has access to a fraction of that power.

Singh said recent initiatives have made tens of thousands of GPUs available to domestic researchers at subsidised prices, but attracting large-scale private and foreign investment remains critical. India is funding Indian foundation model builders and expanding AI Kosh, a national repository of datasets and models. The government is also setting up an AI Safety Institute to test systems for bias, privacy issues, and reliability, reflecting a growing emphasis on responsible AI.

Singh warned that the country’s workforce will face new pressures as generative AI accelerates automation. India’s software and IT services industry, long a global supplier of cognitive work, must upskill quickly and develop indigenous code generation tools, he said, to avoid relying entirely on foreign systems. India plans to convene an AI Impact Summit in February, expected to draw heads of state, global AI executives and researchers. The meeting will examine how AI will affect emerging market jobs, climate resilience and productivity.

For India, Singh said, AI represents both an opportunity and a strategic test. “We need to catch up, and we need to leapfrog,” he said, adding, “And we need to ensure that the benefits reach everyone.”

--IANS

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