India offers to lead global AI regulation, plans to discuss draft framework at GPAI Summit in June-July: Rajeev Chandrasekhar

Union Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar

India is offering to lead the development of a draft global artificial intelligence (AI) regulatory framework, which will be discussed and debated in June-July this year, Union Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on February 20. This comes at a time when there is considerable debate surrounding the potential harms of AI and deepfakes.

“India has offered to lead to charge on creating this draft paper. We expect to have a draft framework discussed and debated before June-July of this year, and have a mid-year GPAI (Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence) Summit, where if not all, but most countries and especially the Global South, who normally get excluded from any debate about the future of tech, that they also participate,” Chandrasekhar said at the Nasscom Technology and Leadership Forum (NTLF) 2024 in Mumbai.

“This is so we can agree on these guardrails and what the nature, form and shape of these rules and these protocols will be. They will essentially be around this basic principle that says that every platform has to be legally accountable for any harm that it causes or enables, and corollary that they should not enable criminality,” he added.

He was in a conversation with Sindhu Gangadharan, MD, SAP Labs India and the vice chairperson for Nasscom.

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Chandrasekhar said that as the largest democracy in the world, with 900 million Indians online and soon to be 1.3 billion people connected to the global internet, India has both an opportunity and a responsibility to influence the way the world thinks about information and collaborates on regulations to create guardrails that protect all consumers and citizens.

Talent brings competitive advantage

The union minister highlighted that the government believes having strong talent in India to be a strategic competitive strength and advantage not only in terms of numbers but also having actual global competitiveness.

“The way we are calling the future of technology is that we have moved from IT/ITES in 2014 to now expanded to include the consumer internet and B2C innovation that we see today. We are now moving to include a wide spectrum of discovery, be it invention of devices, electronics, products, AI, applications, or semiconductors, and a lot of this is going to develop in to this next wave of innovations,” he added.

Chandrasekhar cited the example of the government’s efforts to build an ecosystem for semiconductor talent, which too is seeing a shortage globally. He said that the government has worked with global semiconductor giants to build a multi-year curriculum that covers diplomas, undergraduate programmes, master’s degrees and PhD courses.