Artikkelit

18.09.2024

AI for All? Artificial Intelligence is already a part of everyday life in India

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already made its way to all levels of Indian society. Whether it is about auto rickshaw drivers avoiding the infamous traffic jams of Indian cities by using Uber’s AI updated maps, or the 92% of Indian knowledge workers using AI in their workplaces, Indians have widely adopted artificial intelligence as a part of their daily lives.

The Indian government has actively encouraged detecting diseases and promoting linguistic diversity in the country, to name a few ways to utilize AI. India’s huge IT sector is investing increasingly in AI, and according to a report by Nasscom and BCG, India’s AI services could be worth USD 17 billion by 2027. India’s notoriously large IT workforce of 5 million programmers includes the world’s second largest talent pool in AI, with over 420 thousand professionals working in roles related to AI. The TIME recently published a list of TOP100 most influential people in AI – 15 of them were either Indian or Indian-origin.

How is the most populous country in the world planning to keep up with the AI revolution and benefit from its potential?

National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence – Inclusive Growth through AI

India was relatively early in its adoption of a national AI strategy. Already in 2018, NITI Aayog, the public policy think tank of the Government of India, launched the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence that focuses on AI as a tool for sustainable and inclusive growth. The strategy was built on the principle of ‘AIforAll’, focusing on addressing key challenges through AI innovations in five crucial sectors: healthcare, agriculture, education, smart cities and infrastructure as well as smart mobility and transportation. The strategy identified issues such as absence of enabling data ecosystems, the high resource cost and the absence of collaborative approach to adoption and application of AI as barriers to achieving the goals of the ‘AIforAll’ strategy.
India has described its approach to AI as one focused on harnessing AI for the welfare of people and ensuring the inclusion of the Global South in reaping its benefits. India has highlighted this position during its G20 Presidency in 2023 and in the context of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), founded in 2020 by India and 14 other countries.

India’s model of using AI as a means to achieve its development goals is in line with the country’s wider mission to develop a digital public infrastructure (DPI). Aadhar, the world’s largest biometric identification system and Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a digital fast payments system that made India the world leader in digital transactions, are two examples of India’s digitized public infrastructure. India is also interested in exporting its DPI solutions to other developing countries. Now, India is looking towards finding its new “UPI” in AI.

IndiaAI Mission – Fortifying India’s AI Ecosystem

In addition to highlighting AI’s potential for development, India is increasingly putting efforts to build its own AI technologies and reduce reliance on foreign hardware. In March 2024, the Indian Union Cabinet led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved a new IndiaAI Mission with an outlay of USD 1.25 billion for the next five years. 

The IndiaAI Mission, launched by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), is based on seven main pillars: Compute Capacity, Foundational Models, Datasets, Application Development, Future Skills, Startup Financing and SafeAI. One of the main goals of IndiaAI Mission is to strengthen the national AI ecosystem in India through collaboration between public and private actors within the AI field. Nearly half of the USD 1.25 billion has been earmarked for building the compute capacity for the country. The objective is to offer less expensive compute for local demand and to bridge the “AI Divide” between high-income nations and medium- and low-income countries.

A major part of the IndiaAI Mission is the deployment of 10 000 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) that are crucial for the development of AI through public–private collaborations. However, some Indian technology experts are skeptical about this government-led capacity building of AI. The overall amount of GPUs included in the India AI Mission is quite low, compared to private companies in the AI field. The centrality of purchasing GPUs has also been questioned due to the technology advancing in an extremely fast pace, which means that the money allocated to India AI mission could be used more efficiently if the needed technology would be bought or rented from AI cloud providers. However, due to AI’s strategic importance, India has a strong will to build its own sovereign AI ecosystem inside the country’s borders.

India’s International AI Cooperation – Opportunities for Finland?

Although India’s national strategies focus on building a sovereign AI infrastructure, it is open to collaborate on AI both in multinational initiatives such as GPAI as well as bilaterally with its strategic partners around the world. 

With the US, India has a specific AI initiative called USIAI (US–INDIA Artificial Intelligence Initiative), focusing especially on R&D collaboration and workforce development, and iCET (Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology), focusing on wider cooperation on AI and other new technologies. A similar technology partnership was recently launched between India and the UK. In addition e.g. with Germany, India has a cooperation agreement on AI startups, research and applications in sustainability and healthcare.

In line with its strategic autonomy, India tries to pursue partnerships with everyone – except its geopolitical rivals China and Pakistan – as long as there are mutual interests. These partners include Russia, with whom India has a long history of science and technology cooperation. However, in the field of AI, India looks increasingly to the West where the most advanced AI technology can be found.

What kind of opportunities there are for Finland in AI cooperation with India? The vast talent pool of Indian AI professionals can provide workforce for Finnish companies and research institutions working on AI. Within the Finnish Indian Consortia for Research and Education (FICORE), there is already some cooperation on AI between Finnish and Indian higher education institutions. As India aims to become one of the global leaders of AI, Finnish actors in the AI field should keep their eyes open for opportunities for cooperation with India.

Text: Dr Liisa Toivonen (TFK Counsellor of Higher Education and Science Policy) and Joel Hakala (TFK Trainee) at the Embassy of Finland in New Delhi, India.
Pictures: Liisa Toivonen.