The Indian government is keen to invest in AI and take forward India’s technical leadership in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). India has been involved in discussions that will help shape the future of this powerful new (yet old) technology.
Here is a suggestion to initiate and encourage open-source development from the Indian developer community. The development of an AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) platform that can provide AI services (APIs) for various use cases that would be useful to various sectors in India can be envisioned. This could be part of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure and its next upgrade. The code could be hosted on a git platform hosted on GoI servers so that all of the code, documentation and data will be entirely within India’s jurisdiction.
The AIKosha initiative by GoI contains many use cases that can be used to develop prototypes first. For example, the “AI-Powered Conversational Agent” use-case could be developed collaboratively in open-source mode. Once developed, the service can be made available to the entire Indian technology ecosystem for further customization, localization etc.
The developer access could be opened to all Indian citizens who are willing to contribute and who can demonstrate some expertise or credentials. The contributions could be pro-bono so that only those who are really serious about contributing do so. Compensation and recognition can be decided later based on actual contributions made such as lines of code, commits etc.
Rather than being a Public-Private-Partnership this may be seen as a Government-Citizen-Partnership where citizens contribute directly to the development of Digital Public Infrastructure without the private sector as a middle-man. It would be of further benefit if bureaucratic involvement in this endeavor is at a minimum and only technocrats lead the charge.
This suggestion was sent to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.
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