Generative AI has huge potential to bridge digital divide in India, says MeitY official

From left: Srikanth Velamakanni, Co-Founder, Group Chief Executive and Vice- Chairman, Fractal.Ai; Abhishek Singh, President and CEO, NeGD; MD and CEO, DIC; Vishal Dhupar, MD, Asia South, Nvidia and Pandurang Nayak, Head of Startups Solutions Architect, AWS India at Moneycontrol Startup Conclave

Generative AI has a huge potential in bridging the digital divide in India and in developing more accessible services for citizens, CEO of MeitY's National eGovernance Division (NeGD) and Digital India Corporation (DIC) Abhishek Singh told Moneycontrol.

At a panel discussion as part of the Moneycontrol Startup Conclave in Bengaluru earlier this month, Tipping Point: The AI Era - Separating hype from the reality, decoding the India opportunity, Singh had said that the government is implementing, along with industry and academia, a generative AI solution called Bhashini. He referred to the millions of people in India who are still not connected to the internet, and who would require access to e-services in local languages.

Launched in 2022 under the National Language Translation Mission (NLTM) by MeitY, Bhashini aims to build a National Public Digital Platform for languages and to increase the content in Indian languages on the internet substantially.

"It (Bhashini) could allow people to actually give a voice command and get a reply with regard to which services a person should be eligible for - or how do you get access to PM Kisan Card  and so on. So, these services were built using that. We feel that once this is done, it will provide huge access to services," Singh said.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) executive pointed at the challenges in computation with the advent of generative AI.

"The biggest challenge that we have is of computing. We do see that if we are able to provide access to compute to Indian researchers and startups, they will be able to use the data to develop solutions, which will help easier diagnosis of diseases, easier access to agricultural services of farmers, etc," he said.

Also present in the panel was Vishal Dhupar, MD, Asia South, Nvidia, who explained how generative AI was supplementing to the work of software engineers

"We have reached a space where we can augment the work of a software engineers. Where we can now do work what our software engineers can do, by teaching computers to write software that no human can write," he said.

Singh also touched upon this aspect of generative AI supplementing software engineers' work and  said that there is an urgent need to upskill India's software workforce in order to ensure they do not lose out in the job market.

Pandurang Nayak, Head of Startups Solutions Architect, AWS India acknowledged the need for upskilling, and explained the offerings that the company has in this area.

"While our overarching thing has been about democratizing (large language models), and taking these models out of research and academia and bringing it for everybody to use, we also are looking at how we can develop and build on those skill sets. So, AWS has been working in India, specifically to do a lot of skill training and skill based programs," Nayak said adding that the company recently launched a generative AI course with Coursera.

Moderator of the panel Fractal.Ai's group chief executive Srikanth Velamakanni rounded up the session saying, " Generative AI is not overhyped. It may be "under-hyped". It may be that people are not talking about enough, because what could change is quite fundamental."

"It could change the nature of the world economy, it could change the nature of jobs, nature of work, certainly the nature of innovation, and startups, because these foundation models that are coming through, are a layer of intelligence that can go into everything that you build. And therefore it can it can potentially create massive improvements in the intelligence that we bring to any service or any product or any process," he added.