The Union Government is worried about the effects of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) automation on jobs and industry in India, but is comforted that the country’s large number of science and tech graduates could be quickly retrained, and the lack of white collar jobs that are the most-affected by AI tools at the moment, a senior government official said.
Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Secretary S. Krishnan said that besides major retraining and re-skilling efforts around AI, the government was also in support of helping manufacturing companies retrofit their supply chains with Internet of Things (IoT) devices that would collect the information and data needed for AI models to work in industrial scenarios.
“There are two things which are important for me,” Mr. Krishnan said. “When you talk to companies, many people feel that the newer AI jobs, many of those will get created in India, for two or three reasons. One, that we have a large number of STEM train graduates, many of whom have exposure to AI far more than any other country in the world. And they can be quickly retrained into that space.” Mr. Krishnan was speaking at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) Annual Business Summit 2024 here on Friday.
“The second aspect is that we don’t yet have as many white collar jobs in the services sector that many of the other advanced countries have, which will get more readily displaced compared to the kinds of jobs that we have. So both of these, I think, give rise to some hope and expectation that in the job loss scenario it may not be as bad a situation as it is in certain other economies. But I think a massive amount of retraining would be required and a massive amount of reskilling would be required so the population is ready for those kinds of jobs,” Mr. Krishnan added.
The IT Secretary also said the Union government is ready to spend up to 50% of the cost likely to be incurred of creating computing capacity of up to 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), which are essential to building up India’s AI technology capacity, under the National Artificial Intelligence (AI) mission.
The funding for the project could be done by the government either through a viability gap funding or voucher-based system, Mr. Krishnan said.
Furthermore, the Ministry would be implementing key parts of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023 related to AI innovation and regulation after the elections end on June 4th, Mr. Krishnan said.
Addressing an audience of largely small and medium business owners and executives, Mr. Krishnan said the government would like to see “existing industries be required to retrofit with IoT devices with sensors, which collect the kind of information which is needed for the data which is needed for AI models to really apply in the industry scenario.”
“And that is an effort that we need to make to sort of actually apply these technologies across different industries. And that is an effort in which definitely MeitY and other ministries of the government of India will be quite happy to support,” he added.
Published - May 17, 2024 10:01 pm IST
