Free AI training to 5.5 lakh village entrepreneurs soon, says Ashwini Vaishnaw

NEW DELHI: Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Railways, Electronics & Information Technology, and Information & Broadcasting (I&B), Wednesday said that the government will impart free training on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to nearly 5.5 lakh village-level entrepreneurs (VLE).

"All of you (VLEs) will be given AI training for free. We have set a target under the IndiaAI Mission to skill around 10 lakh people. All 5.5 lakh VLEs will be given preference in that training," the minister said.

Vaishnaw was speaking at the 16th foundation day of the Common Service Centre (CSC) in Delhi.


The minister further said that village entrepreneurs are present in nearly 90% of villages in the country, providing essential government-driven and other digital services.

In March last year, the Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approved the IndiaAI Mission with a budgetary outlay of ₹10,371.92-crore to catalyse AI innovation in the country. It seeks to democratise access to computing infrastructure, improve data quality, develop indigenous AI capabilities, and attract top AI talent, among others.

In May this year, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) said that India’s national compute capacity has surpassed 34,000 GPUs, which will provide a common computational AI platform for training and inference, crucial to develop indigenous foundational models and AI solutions tailored to the domestic context.

The senior minister also said he would personally discuss with state chief ministers to merge various state-level CSCs to provide unified and integrated services.

The Minister of State for Electronics and IT Jitin Prasada said that there was a demand from CSC VLEs for merging state-based government services centres with CSC that could offer a higher income generation opportunity to them.

Sanjay Kumar Rakesh, Managing Director, CSC separately said that the creation of an AI training program is underway, and the initiative would be kicked off within this fiscal year.

CSC Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) was established in 2006 under MeitY, with the vision to deliver digital services to the last mile, and to create a robust ICT-based network across India.

Each CSC is managed by a VLE, a local resident who earns by offering a host of government-to-citizen (G2C) services.

Currently, nearly 2.5 lakhs gram panchayats (village blocks) covering more than 5.5 villages have a CSC.