India and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence or more commonly called acronym- AI, is an advanced technology wherein machines can perform human-like activities and daily tasks with the help of computerized learning and comprehending abilities. Fundamentally AI is a technology which imitates human intelligence to make machine process and reduced any form of data while dedicated human efforts are reduced and the task is carried out synthetically by the machine but in a very humanly way.

In June 2018, the Indian government defined a national policy on AI in a working paper titled, “National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence”. NITI Aayog paper identifiers five focus areas where AI development could enable both growth and greater inclusion: Healthcare, Agriculture, Education, Urban / Smart City Infrastructure and Transportations and Mobility. But this paper also discusses about five barriers: Lack of Research Expertise, Absence of enabling Data Ecosystem, High Resource cost and Low awareness for adoption, Lack of regulations around privacy and security and absence of a collaborative approach to adoption and applications.

Nowadays AI becomes part of our routine life and not simple but very essential part of human life not only all over the world but it becomes most crucial in India. India is a country where most of the population wants their work complete without any types of efforts. AI is literally that where people have to just command over and over to Machinery and put fewer efforts than ever to complete a work.

Startups witnessed a major growth in financial India in 2019. A report said that Artificial Intelligence was among the domain that witnessed the fastest adoption among different industry sector. Presently there are more than 400 startups working on AI and Machine Learning domains. A major investment in India’s AI Industry by private companies or players, but India is far behind many countries like the US, Japan, Chaina etc. of the terminology of investment.

Some challenges that the progress of AI in India faces are limited availability of manpower and of good quality and clean data, as there is no Institutional Mechanism to maintain high quality data. A vast majority of participants agree that they have major concerns regarding data privacy to the point that it is near unanimous and that they are hesitant to even share medical results knowing that is could help provides some personalized knowledge about their health, so data protection still remains a hazy domain hindering the growth of AI. Another culture challenge that India faces is the fact that the cost of failure in an attempt at big innovation and goals might be seen as brave in Silicon Valley, failure after implies a loss of face in India and this was historically meant the lack of room for experimentation.

In term of labour, many companies in US, UK are seeing the trend of hiring no security at the entrance. Real-time face Recognition technology lets people in just by one look at their face. When we try to imagine the same in India, we run into a major problem. Labour in US & UK, is very expensive as compared to the labour in India. Why will a company spend lakhs and lakhs in AI technology. When they can hire a security guard for 7,000/- per month. The entire premises of AI technology are to eliminate redundancy by taking over manual repetitive tasks. But for labour cheap nation like India, you can see how that is a problem. If the government lends its support, I believe AI can revolutionize India completely. The government will be Key.

Indian IT companies and tech startups must initially update technologies and build up AI abilities at en enterprise level. Right skilling is regarded as the crucial factor for achievement in technology adoption. And provided the fast adoption of AI for industry, approximately 2 lakh jobs in the industry are expected by 2022. AI can provide large incremental value to sectors, for example, energy, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, education and agriculture. That will also mean the opportunity for jobs in all these sectors, each for AI experts and other.

But India needs AI talent. The majority of the vendors in that domain are western countries, have a decade plus experience and also have deeper pockets. Unfortunately, AI is not really a domain that could be mastered without solid basics in Mathematics and Core Programming. Students also require access to high-performance computers to have the ability to instruct, check and deploy their AI models. While our universities and premier technology institutions are carrying out research in AI, tech startups and enterprise are taking the analysis further and creating jobs to think of innovation ways and goods based upon AI.

Indian Government, on the first anniversary of the Modi 2.0 government, launched India’s National Artificial Intelligence Portal called INDIAAI. The portals is meant to be a one-stop digital platform for AI-related developments in India, where resources such as articles, startups, investment funds in AI, information about companies and educational institutions related to AI in India will be available.