The Union Cabinet has approved the ‘IndiaAI Mission’ with a budget of Rs 10,372 crore for the next five years. This mission aims to develop infrastructure and ecosystem for AI in India, including building a compute infrastructure of 10,000 or more GPUs through public-private partnerships. This move is expected to boost the AI ecosystem in the country and enable the development of India-specific solutions and use cases.
Prashanth Kaddi, Partner at Deloitte India, highlighted the importance of infrastructure in driving AI innovation. He mentioned that India has a wealth of digital information that can unleash the next wave of innovation. With the adoption of cloud technology in the last decade, some of the challenges related to data storage and computational power for AI have been addressed.
Kaddi explained that GPUs play a crucial role in enabling high computational power for AI applications, especially for complex processes like Generative AI. He emphasized that the announcement of building 10,000 GPUs is a positive step towards democratizing AI use cases and enabling broader access to AI technologies.
Bhoomika Agarwal, from tech-policy think tank The Dialogue, praised the government’s initiative to establish a computing capacity of over 10,000 GPUs, stating that it marks a significant leap forward in AI research and development. She highlighted the focus on priority sectors like healthcare and the inclusion of major Indian languages in AI models as promising aspects of the mission.
Shreya Suri, Partner at Induslaw, commended the government’s commitment to deploying resources for the IndiaAI Mission. She raised concerns about the governance of non-personal data and its distinction from personal data under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. Vaishnavi Sharma, Research Associate at The Dialogue, emphasized the importance of protecting personal data while utilizing non-personal datasets for AI training.
Overall, the approval of the IndiaAI Mission is seen as a positive step towards fostering AI innovation and research in India. The focus on infrastructure development and access to quality datasets is expected to drive the growth of the AI ecosystem in the country.