India’s AI Vision
By Dhurjati Mukherjee
Much hype has been created about Artificial Intelligence (AI) before and after the recent summit as world leaders and leading technical experts shared their experience and expertise. It offered an opportunity for India to delve deep into AI implementation and understand its risks and benefits. In his inaugural address, Prime Minister Modi presented India’s Manav (human) vision for AI and, at the end, the Delhi Declaration, adopted by 86 countries and two organisations called “for collaborative, trusted, resilient and efficient” AI with benefits being shared by humanity.
The big question is whether AI will benefit humanity per se and whether India, with limited R&D spending,will have resources to implement AI infrastructure. Today, there’s barely hardly any AI deployment in key areas such as healthcare, surveillance and finance.
India’s R&D spend stood at 0.7% of GDP in 2024 compared to 2.7% of China and 3.5% in the US. Not just these two countries, India spends much less among the emerging economies and possibly the lowest among the G-20 nations. The picture is even more disheartening in absolute GDP terms. Additionally, in the recent budget, the government cut this year’s allocation to Rs 1000 crore Rs 2000 crore after AI Mission reportedly used only Rs 800 crore. Apart from the government’s not-so-encouraging attitude, private investment also remains quite low compared with China, Japan, not to mention the US. According to reports, China’s electronics giant Huawei alone spent nearly $23 billion on R&D in 2023, more than India’s combined public and private spending.
If intentions are not matched with technological and financial support, the nation cannot proceed much farther. AI is still in its infancy in the country though it has built LLM that supports 22 languages with states like Andhra Pradesh having drawn multi-billion data centre commitments. However, it remains to be seen how much investment India can finally attract after initial estimates reveal that nearly $70 billion has reportedly flowed into AI-related investments.
Barring IITs, science infrastructure and research facilities even in well-known universities needs much to be desired and additional funds must be provided by the Centre. The Union IT Minister recently asserted that industry-led AI labs, along with GPUs, will be introduced in 500 universities to build a large national talent pipeline. Obviously, this would help bridge the gap between students and actual industry needs. However, what remained unanswered is whether the industry would be ready to finance this and, if so, how much funding have they given to universities in the past.
India’s agenda rests on three normative pillars, i.e. people, planet and progress but it appears quite misleading about what it means specially for a developing country like ours. While its claimed that AI would benefit the common man it has not been enumerated how agriculture, food security and healthcare would come to the rescue of the lower segments of society. Though India’s domestic compute capacity remains modest, the stress on semiconductor supply chains is welcome news.
There is no problem in being over-ambitious. The reportedly $200 billion expected in AI infrastructure over the next two years, even if it becomes a reality, in double the time would augur well for the country. Obviously, there is a need for technology upgradation with the right kind of R&D, but what is the contribution of the public and private sectors in financial terms?
There is a big consuming population in the country, but what percentage has the capacity to spend and live a dignified existence? Added to this, the hype of AI in research, specially in the small molecule drug discovery space, may be justified from one perspective but here again the question rises what section of the population can purchase medicines as, in a recent programme, a well-known doctor stated that a significant portion of the populace go undiagnosed from diabetes.
Thus, the challenges cannot be overlooked as the spectre of human job displacement with the rise of AI can’t be doubted. Even the founder of Sun Microsystems has stated that though AI reshapes global services and has opportunities for India, “those will be very, very disruptive to the Indian economy”. As an example, he maintained that “IT services will go away by 2030” and there will be no such thing as BPO. The scope of AI’s weaponisation as the technology is already being used to foment social division, hate, invade privacy or impersonate individuals in many societies. Apart from imparting skills to harness the technology, the question that comes up is the need to place legal, digital and public protective framework to back AI when it goes rogue.
An important question was raised by Yoshua Bengio of University of Montreal that keeping in view that only a handful of countries are leading the AI domain with frontier models, people of most other nations should be mindful of the effects of the risks that are being taken and that are going to affect societies. “We need to understand it socially because there’s a social component psychologically in the case of AI because we’re talking about systems that interact with people and language”.
A key question that arises is the effect of AI on healthcare for the common man. It has not yet been outlined that those who remain undiagnosed for diabetes, cardio-vascular diseases and even cancer — spreading very fast – will benefit from this new technology. AI for the big pharma companies will not benefit the common man. Related to this is the other question— which are the sectors where AI would help the common man? This needs clarity.
Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, in his book ‘Technofeudalism’ sees this age as a return to feudalism. In his portrayal, AI companies are the new extractors, and ordinary citizens must pay their dues to be able to go about their lives. He underlined the fact that most of these companies are based in the US and China and many have deep links to the State apparatus.
Therefore, it’s imperativefor India and countries in the Global South to learn from the past and frame the issue right this time around. AI corporations, like the trading European companies of the yore, may be just service providers today but contain the seeds of a new kind of sovereign entity.
Thus, the question arises is whether history will repeat itself in the AI age. However, national strategy needs to be evolved to incorporate the technology more widely in the country to drive human progress. The India AI Mission must be expanded, support startups accelerated and multilingual applications improved for public service delivery, specially in healthcare and agriculture. There is a strong argument in favour of equipping more people with AI literacy, building the computing and energy infrastructure that powers advanced AI systems and integrating AI more fully into the real workforce. India is well positioned to develop AI literacy and the necessary infrastructure needed to broaden the benefits of technology though much depends on the resources it could marshal towards this end. — INFA