Dr. Rajendra Kumar outlines how AI, DPI and cyber resilience are reshaping gover ..
Tag: ICT4D
Create a “UPI for AI” as a Digital Public Infrastructure
Source of image: Generated by the author using AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is advancing rapidly and the AI models are becoming more and more complex and capable. This is being driven by increasing computational resources, massive data availability and record investments being made in developing ever larger large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters. However, many of the most prominent LLMs are proprietary or closed-source, which may pose significant barriers in their usage by small businesses and start-ups due to the high costs involved in their subscription. There are also a large number of open-source AI models available, including many small language models fine-tuned for specific domains or use cases, which can be used freely by anyone. However, these models have their own individual Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and protocols that may require separate integrations for each model in various applications. This model fragmentation makes the entire process quite cumbersome and inefficient for developers developing applications for various use cases and users trying to seamlessly switch between models to discover the best one suited for their specific requirements.
Can a unified interface like that of UPI be developed for open-source AI models for easier access, interoperability and discoverability? Developing such a unified interface as a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) can address these concerns. The key factors for success of UPI lie in its open architecture, interoperability, and instant real-time transactions through Virtual Payment Addresses (VPAs) or mobile numbers. This creates a level playing field for various payment apps and services. Similarly, an open network of AI models would allow developers to swap between different models from different providers through a Unified Model API without rewriting their application’s core logic. Each model can be provided a Virtual Model Address like that of VPAs in UPI for routing the request to the correct model. Such an architecture would also allow for seamless interoperability between models from different providers based on accuracy, speed or specific domain requirements.
Such a Unified Interface (UI) for AI platform requires several steps for implementation. First, standardization is required to address the issue of API fragmentation in the AI ecosystem. This would involve defining compliant APIs, model data and Input-Output (IO) formats, and a virtual address system for each model. A universal standard would also require broad industry buy-in, which can be addressed through a combination of policy measures and engagement with the industry.
Secondly, a central routing and arbitration layer incorporating a central public registry of AI models would need to be created for intelligent routing of user’s requests to the best-suited model based on performance, costs or domain specific requirements. This central routing layer would also ensure interoperability.
Thirdly, a governance and regulatory compliance layer would need to be created to ensure fair access, maintain security and prevent misuse. This would involve defining security standards for authentication, data privacy and encryption to protect sensitive data shared with the AI models. It would also require a compliance framework to be put in place with clear rules to address AI bias, transparency and accountability. A dispute resolution mechanism would also need to be established.
Last, but not the least, a systematic drive for adoption of the UI for AI would need to be undertaken to ensure that all the model providers are onboarded through a broad consensus for uniform API standards. Continued engagement with them would also be required to keep the ecosystem robust and secure. Start-ups and application developers can be provided with incentives to build applications on top of the unified interface. Government ministries and departments can train specific AI models using their own domain datasets and undertake large-scale development of AI-driven applications for their use cases using this unified AI interface. This would drastically cut down the time required for developing and going-live with their applications.
The concept of a “UPI for AI” as a digital public infrastructure is both feasible and desirable and needs to be actively pursued to simplify model access and enhance interoperability. This would also encourage innovations in AI technologies, model training and their deployment in a large number of use cases. For maximum impact and accessibility, such an endeavour needs to be undertaken by the government through its IndiaAI Mission. This would also help in ensuring security, data privacy and regulatory compliances.
(The above article appeared on October 30, 2025 in The Economic Times online. It is available at: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/create-a-upi-for-ai-as-a-digital-public-infrastructure/articleshow/124943526.cms?from=mdr)
(The author is a senior IAS officer and currently the Secretary, Department of Border Management, Government of India. The views are personal.)
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 40th 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.)
How DIGITAL Has Become a Key Driver of the Indian ECONOMY
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.)
Ideas That Make You Think And Do 