Transforming Governance through AI

Source of the image: Generated through AI by the author

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have the potential to transform governance and bring about a paradigm shift in citizen-centric delivery of services. Imagine a student applying for college admissions. Instead of separately applying for numerous universities and colleges with the need for filling multiple applications with repetitive data each time, an AI-driven system would proactively collate the basic demographic information about the student and suggest the probable list of colleges based on his/her score in the qualifying examination. It would even fill out a common application form for admission to various institutions and automatically apply for various scholarships for which the student might be eligible based on demographic and income criteria. At the other end, the selection and allotment of seats by the universities and colleges would become much easier and faster with the AI-driven system seamlessly sorting the preferences, allocating seats and awarding eligible scholarships to each student. The above system can easily be operated at the state and national levels. The resultant savings in time, cost and efforts for all the stakeholders would be enormous.

The above vision of an AI-driven and proactive governance can easily be replicated in many other domains, e.g., health care, agriculture, crime detection and prevention, cyber security, etc. In health care, AI can help in much faster diagnosis and detection of diseases through analysis of scans, etc. enabling better treatment, remote care, and substantial savings in time and cost for the patients and hospitals. Similarly, predictive data analytics can provide deep insights into patterns of crime and suggest more effective prevention strategies through proactive policing. AI algorithms can analyse traffic flow patterns and suggest better route planning and optimization to reduce congestion. AI-enabled chatbots can provide very specific and contextualized responses in multiple languages to queries from citizens and even deliver a wide range of citizen-centric services, e.g., access to various certificates, education and medical records, etc. They can become invaluable tools in information dissemination and driving citizen engagement.

AI can also enable transformation of the government itself through smarter policy formulation driven by predictive analytics and evidence-based decision making. It can help in formulating proactive strategies and implementing an agile framework for governance.

As outlined above, AI-driven governance can herald a new era of transformation, innovation and efficiency. However, to achieve this vision, the government must take a number of enabling policy initiatives.

First, it must ensure that there are adequate investments in AI focused compute infrastructure and R&D by both the public and private sectors to fuel innovation and development of new applications. Government driven investments in AI infrastructure and R&D will also help in creating a vibrant startup ecosystem in India that can focus on developing AI based applications in various domains.

Second, the government must evolve and put in place a regulatory framework for AI that encourages innovation while at the same time recognizing and mitigating the risks that may be associated with the development and implementation of AI technologies and applications.

Third, the government must enable access to large amounts of anonymized domain datasets which the concerned central ministries and states have built in the course of implementing a very large number of e-governance projects over the past few decades. This will enable the industry and startups to develop and train innovative AI applications for various domains.

Fourth, the industry must focus on ethical development and deployment of AI applications. This would ensure transparency and accountability in the entire process allowing for identification and mitigation of any biases and promotion of fairness and trust amongst all the stakeholders including the end-users.

Fifth, privacy preserving technologies and stringent data security protocols must be followed in the development and deployment of AI applications. This will help in mitigating any risks of data breaches and cyber frauds. It is also essential that all precautions to ensure cybersecurity in the entire infrastructure and application ecosystem are taken.

Last but not least, skilling for AI to meet the burgeoning needs of the industry is of paramount importance. Our best technical institutions must focus on advanced education and R&D while the industry can focus on targeted training programmes in niche areas to build adequate human resource capacity in AI. While India is a global leader in information technology services, when it comes to government readiness for AI, a recent report by Oxford Insights ranks India at the 40^th position out of 193 nations. For making India a global leader in AI, it is the right time to focus on AI-driven governance for transforming the government and reimagining public service delivery.

(The above article appeared in The Economic Times on 28th June, 2024. It is available here: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/transforming-governance-through-ai/articleshow/111543404.cms?from=mdr. The views are personal.)

Writing the New Rules for AI

Regulating AI

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The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 heralded a new era in democratizing the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Since then, use of AI has quickly expanded across many sectors, including healthcare, education, financial services, public safety, etc. However, rapidly advancing capabilities of AI have also brought to the fore the criticality of safety and ethical use of these technologies. At the Global Partnership for Artificial Intelligence summit in 2023 in New Delhi, the Hon’ble Prime Minister stressed the importance of creating a global framework for ethical use of AI, including a protocol for testing and deploying high-risk and frontier AI tools. Earlier, at the first global AI Safety Summit 2023 at Bletchley Park, 28 countries gave a call for international cooperation to manage the challenges and risks of AI.

How can a global framework for safe and ethical use of AI be developed? Several countries have initiated efforts to regulate and govern AI. The US government issued an executive order in October 2023, focusing on safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of AI. It seeks to address several critical areas, including national security, consumer protection, privacy, etc. and requires AI developers to share safety results with the US government. EU’s AI Act adopts a risk-based regulatory approach with stricter oversight for higher levels of risk of the AI systems.

At a fundamental level, a global framework for governance of AI must address the key concerns regarding development, deployment and use of AI. These include dealing with machine learning biases and potential discrimination, misinformation, deep fakes, concerns on privacy and access to personal data, copyright protection, potential job losses, and ensuring the safety, transparency and explainability of the AI algorithms.

The goal of AI governance should be to promote innovation and ensure safe, fair and ethical applications of the technology in promising sectors. To address the concerns noted above, the framework for governance of AI must be based on certain core principles, which can be enumerated as below.

Innovation: The governance framework must promote innovation and competition in AI technologies to continuously improve them. This would require, for example, facilitating access to large amounts of anonymized datasets to startups for developing and training AI applications in various domains. The National Data Governance Policy of GoI is an excellent initiative in this direction.

Infrastructure: The framework must also support expanding access to compute infrastructure and AI models to promote competition and encourage innovation. This would particularly be helpful to startups in this domain.

Capacity Building and Engagement: A sustainedfocus on capacity building holds the key to involving and engaging with more stakeholders in the development and deployment of AI across multiple sectors. This can significantly help in managing and reducing the risks. Engaging with stakeholders would also help in addressing any potential job losses and worker displacements due to deployment of AI.

Safety and Risk Management: This would involve development of standards and ensuring that AI models are tested and assessed for safety and risk. Appropriate risk management strategies must be put in place to address any likely harms that may be caused. This would include ensuring transparency, fairness and explainability in the AI development lifecycle through selection of proper training data sets, removing any biases and ensuring that cybersecurity issues have been addressed.

Privacy Protection: AI models must focus on privacy preserving technologies to ensure protection of privacy. This would help in creating trust in these models and enhancing their beneficial impact.

International Cooperation: For any global framework to succeed, international collaboration and partnerships built on a shared vision and common goals are essential. A global framework on AI must build on evidence in this rapidly evolving technology and promote collaboration across all countries to become effective. India, being a global leader in technology, can play a proactive role in developing a global framework for governance of AI based on the key principles enumerated above. With its huge technology talent base and a rapidly growing economy, India enjoys a unique advantage in the global technology ecosystem, which it can leverage in this direction. We also need to focus on the development of AI applications trained on Indian data sets in various domains, such as agriculture, education, health care, transportation, public safety, etc., which can play a huge role in revolutionising the entire citizen-centric service delivery paradigm and bring efficiency gains at a systemic level across multiple sectors.

(The above article appeared in The Economic Times on January 28, 2024. It is available here: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/catalysts/writing-the-new-rules-for-ai/articleshow/107192031.cms?from=mdr. The views are personal.)

How DIGITAL Has Become a Key Driver of the Indian ECONOMY

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India has emerged as a shining star on the global economic horizon as the world recovers from the aftermath of the pandemic. India was the world’s fastest growing major economy in 2021 and 2022 and will continue to be so during the current and the next few years as well. During FY23, the Indian economy is projected to grow by 7.0%, while the latest forecast by The World Bank for FY24 is 6.6%. In contrast, the global economy is expected to grow by just 1.7% during 2023. India would be thus, for the first time in many decades, driving the global economy, even as most of the major economies are witnessing a significant slowdown in economic growth.

One of the key factors that is driving this economic transformation in India is its rapidly growing digital economy. Digital economy has prospered greatly under the Digital India programme and is expected to reach $1 trillion by FY27 from its current level of about $300 billion, thus increasing its share in the GDP from around 9% currently to about 20% during this period. Digital economy would thus be a key driver for our overall economic growth in the coming years.

How has the Digital Economy Become so Vital to the Country’s Broader Economy?

Across the board digitalisation in both public and private sectors is helping in generating innovation and unlocking major efficiency and productivity gains. The government has created several major cross-cutting national public digital platforms, such as Aadhar for digital identity, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for online payments, Government e-Marketplace (GeM) for public procurement, Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) for indirect taxation, GatiShakti for logistics, etc. that have completely transformed the way government agencies deliver services and how businesses operate.

These platforms have enabled the government to make all citizen and business centric services fully online, and businesses to digitalize their operations and realize payments and tax refunds without delay. Fully online Account Aggregators are now making credit available to individuals and MSMEs easily without any paperwork through consent-based online data sharing. These are bringing major improvements in the flow of credit and efficient utilisation of resources across the entire economy.

Massive digitalisation by the government in almost all domains of governance has also helped in improving both ease of doing business and ease of living for citizens. Most of the government agencies, at the central, state and local levels, have undertaken significant process re-engineering for digitalising their services and this has helped in making the entire approval process and delivery of services time-bound and predictable. This has been achieved despite the fact that most of the laws governing these domains have remained the same.

What is Driving this Digital Transformation in India?

India has a young population with around 840 million internet users and a rapidly growing smartphone penetration even amongst the rural population. Availability of high-speed 4G network and the world’s cheapest data rates are bringing more and more people online. The adoption of digital technologies has also increased manifold during the pandemic, both for personal and professional activities. The increasing optic fibre penetration in villages under BharatNet and the quickly expanding 5G network would help in bringing the last 40% of our population online in the near future.

Massive digitalisation in the economy has also helped our start-ups in creating businesses based on innovation and becoming competitive internationally. Today, a vast majority of nearly 80,000 startups are tech-focused with a combined valuation of around $450 billion. With over 100 unicorns, the Indian startup ecosystem is the third largest in the world.

With the advent of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, augmented and virtual reality, Internet of Things, metaverse, Industry 4.0, etc., the contribution of digital economy to India’s economic growth is expected to gain further momentum in future. However, these are also expected to bring new challenges, especially in addressing online user harms, cybersecurity and protection of personal data and privacy.

To enable the digital economy to drive the next phase of growth in the broader economy, India would need to focus on creating a world-class digital infrastructure including new age data centres, become a global hub for electronics and semiconductor manufacturing, create world-leading public digital platforms in domains like healthcare, agriculture, education, logistics, etc., ensure cybersecurity, drive innovation through the emerging technologies, bring new legal and regulatory framework to deal with data sharing and personal data protection and focus massively on skilling. Achieving this vision for the next phase of Digital India will also make India the global leader in digital economy within this decade.

The above article appeared in The Economic Times on 12th February, 2023 and is available here: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/catalysts/ettech-opinion-digital-a-key-driver-of-the-indian-economy/articleshow/97825464.cms?from=mdr. The views expressed are personal.

How Bharat is being digitally transformed

Digital India is a flagship programme of the government that aims at transforming India into a digitally empowered economy and knowledge society. It was approved in August 2014 with three key goals in mind: provide quality digital infrastructure to every citizen, provide all public services digitally on demand and empower citizens digitally to enable them to participate fully in a rapidly digitalising economy and society. The approach was to involve all the central ministries and all the states in a whole-of-government framework to work holistically to achieve these goals. How has the programme performed in its eight years of implementation and what lies ahead for it?

The achievements under the programme have been quite impressive by any standards. BharatNet has become the world’s largest rural broadband programme with over 5.75 lakh kilometers of optical fibre laid to connect over 1.85 lakh village panchayats. With near universal 4G coverage, the number of internet users in India has exploded to 83 crores with access to the world’s cheapest mobile data. A huge network of nearly 5 lakh common services centres across the entire country provide assisted access to a wide range of online services. The coverage of Aadhaar and banking services have become near universal, allowing everyone to access online services and receive benefits in their bank accounts directly. Digital inclusion has been a key goal of this programme with over 5.14 crore people trained in digital literacy under the Prime Minister’s Gramin Digital Saksharta Abhiyan.

The confluence of universal digital identity, banking services, mobile phones and increasing digital literacy has resulted in huge expansion of demand for online services. The volume of online transactions has grown over 50 times to over 34 crores per day. DigiLocker, Mobile Seva and UMANG platforms have greatly simplified the access to a wide range of public services through mobiles. Digital life certificates through Jeevan Praman have proved to be a boon to over 5.6 crore pensioners in the country.

India is now the global leader in digital payments with the Unified Payments Interface transactions crossing the $1 trillion mark in value during 2021-22. The Direct Benefits Transfer now covers over 300 schemes and over 22.7 lakh crore have already been transferred to the beneficiaries’ bank accounts directly.

New-age digital platforms in health and education have transformed the delivery of services in these domains. CoWin has become the world-leading platform for covid vaccinations with over 194 crore vaccine doses administered. The online teleconsultation platform, e-Sanjeevani, has greatly helped the people in accessing healthcare services during covid with nearly 4 crore tele-consultations conducted. Under the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, over 22 crore health accounts have been created. Similarly, DIKSHA is the nation’s largest online platform for school education.

With a thriving technology and innovation ecosystem, India has become the world’s third largest startup hub with over 100 unicorns. Tech startups alone have created over 23 lakh jobs since 2016. Many of these startups are focused on advanced research and development in emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, metaverse, web 3.0, robotics, Internet of Things, 5G, etc.

India has also made great strides in electronics manufacturing with the country now the world’s second largest manufacturer of mobile phones in terms of volume. With the new Production-Linked Incentives schemes, the country is poised to become a global leader in semiconductors and large-scale electronics manufacturing as well.

With such impressive achievements under its belt, what lies next for Digital India? It is clear that the programme owes its success to well-defined goals, adequate funding and a whole-of-government approach in both conceptualisation and implementation of various schemes. It must now transform itself in both scale and scope to achieve the target of $1 trillion digital economy by 2026 and make India a global leader in advanced digital technologies. Scaling up would involve enhancing the coverage of the programme to the entire country including all the villages and the entire population including women and the weaker sections. On the other hand, enhancing the scope would imply that such digital transformation permeates all sectors of the economy including the micro, small and medium enterprises and all governance domains, both at the central and state levels. For achieving this vision, specific focus would be required in the next phase of the programme on digital infrastructure, digital government, electronics manufacturing, modern digital laws with a focus on digital privacy, cyber security, capacity building and skilling.

(The above article appeared in The Economic Times on July 3, 2022 and is available at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/how-bharat-is-being-digitally-transformed/articleshow/92613053.cms?from=mdr. The views expressed in the article are personal.)

Digital India: What’s Next?

Digital transformation is a key central theme of Budget 2022 with announcements ranging from infrastructure status to data centres to taking fibre to all panchayats under the BharatNet programme. Introduction of a blockchain based sovereign digital currency, setting up of 75 digital banking units, constitution of an Animation, Visual effects, Gaming and Comics (AVGC) task force, launch of a digital university, digitalisation of school education platforms and support for the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme for large scale electronics manufacturing and IT hardware were also part of the overall focus. The incentive scheme of US $10 billion for semiconductor and display fabs announced earlier also fits into the broader vision for making India “Aatmanirbhar” and a global leader in digital technologies.

How can the Digital India programme be reinvented to achieve this vision? This programme, launched in 2015 with the goal of ushering in digitally driven transformation in governance, economy and society, already has many highly noteworthy achievements. Many flagship schemes, e.g., the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), the digital literacy programme (PMGDISHA), e-Hospital, DigiLocker, Common Service Centres (CSCs), etc. have seen massive expansion under Digital India. The number of internet users has also grown to over 83 crores now, which is fuelling further aspirations for a full-scale digital transformation in all domains with focus on ease of living and ease of doing business.

The Digital India 2.0 needs to be architected on six major pillars for accelerating digitalisation and achieving the vision of complete digital transformation. First, it needs to ensure provision of world-class digital infrastructure in the country, including high-speed broadband connectivity to all through fibre and 5G network, and hyperscale data centres to make India a global hub for data centres and cloud. With increasing focus on privacy, security and the need for storing data within the country, there are strong demand drivers in place for making investments in data centres attractive.

Second, digital government and digital services need to undergo a paradigm shift with focus on data governance, whole-of-government approach and creation of new public digital platforms in major domains such as education, health, agriculture, logistics, etc. The National Digital Health Mission and the PM Gati Shakti initiatives are aimed at this vision. There is a need for building similar public digital platforms in other domains. There also needs to be a strong focus on standards, interoperability and using common technology platforms, such as Aadhaar, UPI, Single Sign-on, etc. to make the development of new applications easier and faster.

The third major area where there is a great potential for digital transformation is in accelerating the growth of our digital economy to at least USD one trillion in the next 4-5 years. This requires ensuring high and sustainable growth in electronics manufacturing, IT-ITES and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, Internet of Things, 5G, etc. Creating a vibrant start-up ecosystem in these areas holds the key to achieving the trillion-dollar digital economy goal.

Fourth, we need to modernise our digital laws to support the rapid growth of the digital economy, and address the growing concerns on accountability of online platforms and increasing cyber security threats. Enacting the personal data protection bill would help in addressing the privacy concerns. The new statutes would be helpful in creating trust and confidence amongst the users in the online world, which is crucial for digital inclusion as we need to focus now on bringing the remaining 40% of the population into the digital world.

Another major area of focus should be on rapid advancements in strategic and emerging technologies with ownership of intellectual property. We need to quickly formulate national strategies in these areas and fund the flagship initiatives. Recently published strategies by MeitY on blockchain and additive manufacturing are steps in the right direction. A national policy on data governance also needs to be formulated so that access to data, so crucial to advancement in these technologies, is made easier for our researchers, start-ups, etc.

Last, but not the least, there needs to be a strong push for skilling and capacity building in digital technologies at all levels in partnership with the industry and academia. Schemes such as FutureSkills Prime need to be expanded to provide for the rapidly growing need for highly skilled resources. PMGDISHA needs to expand at the population scale to make all citizens digitally literate. India should rightly aim at becoming the skill and talent capital of the world.

With rapid strides already made under the Digital India programme, it is the right time to visualise India becoming a global leader in digital technologies across the entire spectrum, not just in IT services. The next phase of Digital India should aim to achieve this vision.

(The above article appeared in The Economic Times on April 3, 2022 and is available at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/whats-next-for-digital-india/articleshow/90608332.cms. The views are personal.)