NITI Aayog suggests 5 areas to adopt Artificial Intelligence for enhancement

Niti Aayog

NITI Aayog has underlined five focus areas where artificial intelligence (AI) should be leveraged for enhancement. In its discussion paper named National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, the government’s think tank has identified healthcare, education, agriculture, smart cities and infrastructure, and smart mobility and transportation that can be benefited with the adoption of AI.

As per NITI Aayog, it was Budget 2018 that mandated it to “establish the National Programme on AI to guide R&D in frontier technologies.” Following this, it drafted and released the discussion paper to lay the ground work for evolving national strategy for AI.

According to the paper, use of AI-based healthcare solutions can also help in making healthcare services more proactive – moving from “sick” care to true “health” care, with emphasis on preventive techniques.

For education sector, AI has the potential to bring about changes by supplementing pedagogy and establishing systems to inform as well as support decision-making across stakeholders and administrative levels.

The use of AI in agriculture can result in having significant global impact on productivity at all levels of the value chain.

Similarly, in infrastructure and transportation sectors, application of AI can help significantly, stated the paper.

Besides highlighting the potential of AI tools and technologies in transforming the above mentioned sectors and state of Indian economy as a whole, the paper also detailed a multitude of challenges that India needs to overcome to realize the full potential of AI. It included lack of enabling data ecosystem, low intensity of AI research, and inadequate availability of AI expertise, manpower and skilling opportunities, among others.

Recommending actions for the government to promote the technology, it proposed to establish Centre of Research Excellence (CORE) focusing on core technology research in AI and others solutions based on its usage.

NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said, “The paper gives many disruptive suggestions, including one to utilize market place models for data, annotation and deployable solutions in AI.”