Govt will regulate AI, other tech from potential harm to users: MoS IT

Rajeev Chandrasekhar

On Friday, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Minister of State for Electronics and IT, announced that the government will enforce regulations on technologies like artificial intelligence, taking into account the potential harm they can cause to users.

Allaying fear of job loss from the development of AI, the minister said there will be no threat to jobs from artificial intelligence in the next few years, but it may happen after 5-7 years.

"Our approach towards AI or any regulation is that we will regulate it through the prism of user harm. This is a new philosophy, which has started since 2014 that we will protect digital nagriks. We will not allow platforms harming digital nagriks. If they operate here, then they will mitigate user harm," Chandrasekhar said.

He was speaking at an event to share nine years of achievement of the government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Chandrasekhar said the visit of OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman to India significantly indicates the potential of India in the realm of emerging technologies.

The minister said that under the Congress-led UPA regime, section 79 was introduced under the IT Act, which gave a free run to big tech platforms, but the current regime has brought in rules to make big tech companies accountable.

Chandrasekhar termed the UPA regime as a lost decade during which the profit-making public sector telecom firm BSNL turned into a debt-ridden loss-making entity.

He slammed former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan for his criticism of the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme.

In a recent article, Rajan said that subsidy under the PLI scheme is given only for finishing phones in India and not on value addition done by manufacturers in India, and therefore, India still imports what goes into the mobile phones.

Chandrasekhar took a swipe at Rajan and called him "a new member of Congress".

"Sometimes Raghuram Rajan, a new Congress member, talks about it. For him, the moral of the story is that you will embarrass yourself less if you do not talk much about the subject you don't know much about." The minister said there is a "massive leap" in the electronics manufacturing sector in the country.

"We are manufacturing 100 per cent mobiles in the country unlike importing eighty per cent of the product in the past," he said, adding "Last year, we exported mobile phones worth over Rs 1 lakh crore".

Chandrasekhar said that India under Prime Minister Modi is becoming a "global trusted partner" for manufacturing.

He also slammed the Kerala government for allegedly deploying optical fibre cable imported from China instead of procuring it from companies that are manufacturing it in India.

The minister said that the government has opened a window for a revised scheme for semiconductors and received applications from companies, including Vedanta-Foxconn JV for the incentives.

Talking about online gaming, Chandrasekhar said self-regulatory organisations – the bodies that will approve permissible games – have to be formed within 90 days from the date the regulations were notified.

"In the interim, in the next 90 days, as we wait for SROs, the government will make a decision on what is permissible or not permissible," he said.