The government will launch India AI programme, an artificial intelligence platform stacked with “one of the largest publicly assembled datasets in the world”, by early April, minister of state for electronics and information technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar has said.
Speaking at the inaugural edition of the Moneycontrol India Fintech Conclave on March 7, Chandrasekhar said, "The programme will be one of the largest publicly assembled and available data sets in the world. Working with the fintech ecosystem, it will certainly catapult and catalyse the next generation of fintech and other parts of the Internet."
The India AI programme, also known as the National Data Governance Framework Policy, was also announced by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Budget speech on February 1.
"To unleash innovation and research by start-ups and academia, a data governance policy will be brought out. This will enable access to anonymised data," Sitharaman said.
In 2022, the IT ministry issued a fresh draft of the National Data Governance Framework Policy (NDGFP) with increased emphasis on sharing non-personal data for building a large repository of India-specific datasets and for use by researchers and start-ups.
As part of the framework, a platform will be designed to process requests and provide access to non-personal and/or anonymised datasets to Indian researchers and start-ups.
Speaking at the Fintech Conclave, Chandrasekhar also said the upcoming Digital Personal Data Protection Bill and the Digital India Act would cause behavioural changes in how platforms interact with consumers and citizens.
The consultation on the framework of the Digital India Act begins on March 9 in Bengaluru.
"It (Digital India Act) is a successor to the IT Act. It is a global standard, contemporaneous legislation that addresses the future of internet, addresses the future of tech innovation ecosystem, addresses issues of user harm, openness accountability," the minister said.
Chandrasekhar said the bill would define various types of intermediaries. "Today the diversity of intermediaries, the complexity and the difference between intermediaries, require different types of regulation and different types of rulemaking," he said, adding that the bill would only be enacted after undertaking a consultation process.
