IndiaAI Datasets Platform set to go live by January next year

The IndiaAI Datasets Platform, one of the pillars of the government’s Rs 10,000 crore IndiaAI Mission, will be live by January 2025, Nand Kumarum, chief executive of the National eGovernance Division (NeGD), said on Wednesday.

The aim is to create a platform like HuggingFace, a US-based collaborative and open-source forum hosting datasets and artificial intelligence (AI) models to enable developers to create, train and deploy their own models.

“The idea primarily is like HuggingFace – you have models, you have datasets, and you have people coming up and using those datasets and building models. We are trying to do something similar,” Kumarum said at an event in the national capital.

Data from central and state governments, as well as from the private sector, will be part of this, he told media persons on the sidelines of the event. On private partnerships, he said that work is ongoing.

Kumarum added that while bringing in thousands of datasets and models that a global repository like HuggingFace has is not easy and will take time, the skeletal framework will be live by at most the end of January.

The six other pillars of the IndiaAI Mission, announced by the electronics and information technology ministry in March, are compute capacity, future skills, an innovation centre, application development initiative, startup financing, and safe and trusted AI.

The NeGD provides the technology for the implementation of the ministry’s egovernance projects.

Kumarum also said that generative AI has several potential use cases in the government. For instance, it can help in drafting requests for proposals or schemes if trained on past documents, improve office productivity and enable easy comparison of different states’ policies.

Similarly, AI trained on norms around buildings, roads, irrigation systems and others can help to partly automate the verification and approval process, he said.