Industry seeks clear Artificial Intelligence policy

Policy will augment intelligence, not displace jobs: Prasad

Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad. File

Stating that Artificial Intelligence (AI) had the potential to help solve complex developmental challenges in India, including improving food and water security, the industry sought clearly defined policy priorities and access to ‘clean data’ for application of AI.

Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday interacted with more than 30 representatives from the industry and academia, including AI experts from the IITs at Kharagpur, Madras, Hyderabad and Patna and representatives from Microsoft, Google, IBM, Accenture, NVIDIA and Nasscom.

While acknowledging that work had already been done in the field by U.S. and China, the Minister said that India’s model of uptake and scale-up of AI would be one that was indigenous to India and built on the principle of augmenting intelligence and not displacement of jobs, the Centre said in an official statement.

During the workshop, industry and academia were unanimous in seeking support for getting clean data for evolving effective solutions through the application of AI. “They also opined that the government should define policy priorities in the application of AI. This would facilitate them in pursuing a strategy that would benefit the country most,” the statement said.

Further, the industry stressed that data had to be made available for innovation and India being a country with large number of languages and dialects, there was a need to translate data in a usable format. “Country has all [the] ingredients to be a hub centre for data analysis.”

Robust legal framework

The Minister said that the government would help facilitate interactions between the industry, government and academia and would come up with a robust legal framework for developing the ecosystem for AI.

Replying to a query, he said while data privacy was an important tenet of an individual’s rights, innovation cannot be curbed under the garb of privacy, according to the statement.

“AI applications had a potential to help improve food and water security for the country, help improve traffic management and also help expedite particular types of cases in the judiciary,” the participants pointed out.