India is working on AI regulation, will require political consensus : Ashwini Vaishnaw

Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw

India is working on a legislation to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), with a focus on addressing risks and implementing safeguards against potential harms, Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said.

Speaking on the inaugural day of the Global IndiaAI Summit (2024),  Vaishnaw said, “India is working on AI regulation. It will require political consensus.”

“We need to collectively figure out a way to impose limits on AI. In India, we have understood that for many of the problems we face, AI can be a very big tool to solve problems. Simultaneously, we need to contain the risks,” Vaishnaw added.

Vaishnaw also said that setting guardrails for AI would require global consensus. In this regard, he noted that the Global IndiaAI Summit will deliberate on this issue over the next two days.

Regarding the IndiaAI mission launched by Vaishnaw on July 3 as part of the summit, the minister announced that the government would invest in creating a platform where computing power, high-quality datasets, and a common framework, among other resources, will be made available.

“We will be investing in creating a compute infrastructure of 10,000 or more GPUs. We will be creating AI innovation centers, we will focus on procuring high quality datasets. We will have an application development initiative and also put huge emphasis on skill development,” he added.

Vaishnaw made these announcements as part of the opening ceremony of the Global IndiaAI Summit, which was attended by Minister of State for Electronics and IT Jitin Prasada, Japan’s Minister Hiroshi Yoshida, Srinivas Narayanan, VP of OpenAI, among others.

Narayanan said that AI has added dynamism to India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. “OpenAI is committed to supporting IndiaAI’s application development initiative,” he said. Applications include sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, and education, OpenAI's Narayanan said.

MoS Prasada said that GPAI will provide a platform for like-minded countries in the development and deployment of AI.

S Krishnan, secretary of MeitY, said, “We need to ensure that AI actually does benefit the world at large, the community at large and at the same time we work together to prevent whatever user harm is that it can create.”

“India has played an important role in the GPAI, and has been very important contributor to this discussion at various levels,” Krishnan added.