Soon, AI bots to call beneficiaries to seek feedback on govt's flagship schemes

The AI based call bots will be deployed as part of establishment of a centralised digital feedback platform on the government's schemes

Soon, beneficiaries of government's flagship schemes such as Ayushman Bharat, PM SVAnidhi, PM Ujwala Yojana and so on, may soon get calls from an artificial intelligence-enabled bot asking for feedback on such schemes.

The government plans to deploy this as part of a centralised digital platform being established to seek feedback from beneficiaries of various schemes. The government intends to improve delivery of benefits of such schemes to citizens.

The National Informatics Centre (under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) has been tasked to develop this centralised digital feedback platform.

"The NIC has been asked to develop and operationalize a centralized digital platform for collecting feedback," said an expression of interest floated to implement AI-based bot calls.

"The digital platform will facilitate two-way communication for fetching up beneficiary data from the portal and report back the feedback on the same portal," it read.

And the government envisions one of the way of procuring these feedbacks, are through AI-based bot calls.

The AI-based bot calls will be used to conduct surveys and gather feedback, and the government wants to do it in an cost-effective manner. The government has mandated that the bot should be able to support regional languages.

As part of phase 1 of the feedback  program, the government wants to begin the AI-based calls to get responses on schemes such as PM Kisan Samman Nidhi, PM SVANidhi, PM-JAY- Ayushman Bharat Cards, Pradhan Mantri Uijwala Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Rural) and Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban).

Additionally, the government has mandated a Make-In-India proponent for the procurement of the AI-based call bot, with a mandated "local content" of 50 percent.

The government has also directed that  if the AI-based bot solution has to be connected with telecom networks then the technology can only be procured from trusted sources. 'Trusted Products' are products whose critical components and the products themselves are sourced from Trusted Sources.

This is not the first time that the government has integrated artificial intelligence in the delivery of central flagship schemes and missions.

In September 2023, the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare launched an AI chatbot for the  Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) scheme. The chatbot is aimed at providing accurate information on the scheme to farmers. It was developed with the help of MeitY's Bhashini initiative.