Artificial Intelligence race with China: Panel to create road map

NEW DELHI: To counter China’s commitment towards artificial intelligence, the government has formed a high-level committee headed by NITI Aayog vice chairman Rajiv Kumar to lay out a roadmap for India’s research and development on AI and its applications. The panel, which will be a mix of government, academia and industry officials, will be notified soon.

The government wants to ensure India does not fall behind in emerging technologies and hence the urgency to roll out a nationwide AI programme that will include robotics and data analytics. China has prepared a threestep roadmap to become the world leader in AI by 2030.

A preliminary meeting on AI was held in January and was attended by NITI Aayog member VK Saraswat, the secretaries of biotechnology and science and technology, former Nasscom head Kiran Karnik, former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai, IIT faculty members including Pankaj Jalote and Pulok Ghosh, besides top officials from Flipkart, NetApp and TIE Ventures. “A committee has been formed to coordinate the efforts of different ministries and bring them together. The next meeting will happen soon and we hope to decide on the timeline for the committee to come up with a roadmap for a national programme on AI,” a senior government official told ET.

In the Union Budget last week, the government entrusted the Aayog with developing a national AI programme. Under the programme, the government is likely to offer incentives to startups and venture funds that undertake application-oriented research on AI across key sectors including banking, insurance, education, health, retail and transportation.

Financial allocation under the Atal Innovation Mission will be used to fund the programme on a nationwide scale and projects will be granted on the challenge mode. Once the roadmap for a nationwide programme is in place, the Aayog will start hiring domain experts.

India’s vision for AI would include new technologies like robotics, data analytics and machine learning, a senior industry veteran who was part of the meeting said on condition of anonymity.

“India should not miss the bus on new emerging technologies. We are glad that the government is pushing for creating a vision for AI along with industry stakeholders,” he said.

“China has an ambitious $150 billion plan to dominate the world of AI globally over a decade or so. China and the US are already dominating this field,” said Mohandas Pai, chairman of Aarin Capital and former CFO of Infosys. “India needs to have its own vision to dramatically disrupt the world in AI.”

The government is providing support of up to Rs 10 crore to established and upcoming incubation centres, depending on the criteria laid out in the Atal Innovation Mission, for which an allocation of Rs 500 crore was made in 2015-16. The original allocation for 2017-18 stood at Rs 112 crore, which has been revised to Rs 150 crore, and Rs 200 crore has been allocated for 2018-19.

With elections scheduled next year, the budget has laid emphasis on the rural and farm sector as well as healthcare. Besides, the allocation under MUDRA Yojana has been enhanced.