India&#8217;s Digital Infrastructure is Changing Super Fast with AI
AI is transforming India’s e-governance landscape and reaching the farthest of underserved communities. From processing numerous queries round the clock to enabling bilingual support, advancements in AI are making government initiatives more accessible and efficient than ever. “Our AI systems now process between 5 to 7 lakh queries every month, operating 24/7, which is crucial in ensuring millions of citizens get timely assistance,” said Sharmishtha Dasgupta, deputy director general of the National Informatics Centre, during the Nvidia Summit held in Mumbai last week. She goes on to mention that these queries range from enrollment and eligibility checks to updates and troubleshooting. The system’s capacity to manage such high volumes highlights its scalability and efficiency, as well as its alignment with the Digital India campaign’s goal of making government services accessible to every citizen. Dasgupta also noted that AI-powered bilingual support systems have been functional in bridging linguistic and digital divides. “Bilingual AI-powered support systems are making interactions with government schemes like PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana straightforward, reducing complexities and ensuring citizens can engage in their preferred language,” she added. For instance, IRCTC, an extension of Indian Railways, is also using the conversational AI platform AskDISHA 2.0 chatbot to help customers book railway tickets through voice, chat, and click-based operations. “In our constant pursuit to enhance the user experience, leveraging new age technologies, today we are taking a giant leap. Now passengers can book train tickets in a conversational manner, leveraging our AI Virtual Assistant, AskDISHA 2.0, powered by CoRover Conversational AI platform,” Rajini Hasija, CMD, IRCTC said. During the Nvidia Summit, Tanusree Barma, deputy director general of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), highlighted the transformative AI developments within UIDAI, as the organisation moves towards adopting and using indigenous AI capabilities. Barma stated, “Within UIDAI, we have been silently having an AI revolution to enable indigenous implementation of LLMs as well as AI models to apply for biometric duplication and detection.” Barma also talked about the critical role that AI now plays in the nation’s digital identity framework, emphasising how these AI models help strengthen security, improve accuracy and drive innovation for the UIDAI. She further said that by focusing on homegrown AI solutions, UIDAI not only aims to reduce dependency on foreign AI technologies but also ensures data sovereignty and control, a major step in India’s broader AI ambitions. Innovative Case Studies Manohar Paluri, VP of AI at Meta, recently told AIM, “India is possibly among the top three in terms of Llama downloads and variants, and it’s also among the top two in terms of how many developers there are. The appetite for technology and the appetite of people adapting to new technology in this part of the world is amazing.”Paluri has talked about one of the case studies, Pratham, a nonprofit for education. “Pratham is an example of how this technology is being used to teach kids in an affordable way. So, you are scaling yourself where these chatbots actually can help you learn about a particular subject very quickly,” he added. He explained how farmers can now use this technology in their native language and get the best information on agriculture and financial assistance, which was previously not feasible or accessible. “So when you think about learning, it is going to be redefined now with technologies like Llama as well as MovieGen,” Paluri added. He also discussed the benefits of an open ecosystem, where people can take the model and fine-tune it as per their needs. “I was actually in Japan two weeks ago. There were Japanese versions of Llama, where they were able to tune it,” he said. Paluri also mentioned a Korean version and a Korean high school math version of Llama. “We are trying to bring high-quality Indian tokens into Llama, so that it works for Indian languages,” said Paluri. He also mentioned that Llama, being the engine for Meta-AI, will work for Indian languages. This will help billions of people in India, who are using Meta-AI on WhatsApp and other Meta products. Future Prospects Meanwhile,BharatGen, India’s first government backed multimodal AI initiative, has released e-vikrAI, an advanced solution powered by Vision Language Models, tailored for product images in Indic e-commerce.Spearheaded by IIT Bombay under the National Mission on Interdisciplinary Cyber-Physical Systems (NM-ICPS) of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), BharatGen focuses on creating AI models tailored to India’s diverse languages and cultural contexts.
AI is transforming India’s digital infrastructure and reaching the farthest of underserved communities.
AI is transforming India’s digital infrastructure and reaching the farthest of underserved communities.
["AI Infrastructure", "Digital India", "infrastructure", "NVIDIA"]
["Go", "infrastructure", "Digital India", "AI", "chatbots", "Scala", "Git", "RAG", "Aim", "multimodal AI", "GAN", "AI Infrastructure", "NVIDIA", "R"]
["AI", "multimodal AI", "Aim", "RAG", "chatbots", "R", "Go", "Scala", "Git", "GAN"]
Shalini is a senior tech journalist, exploring the latest advancements in AI. When she's not reporting on the latest innovations, you can find her immersed in her next literary adventure.