SUMMARY
India has developed capability, capacity and confidence in the last nine years, particularly in technology and innovation space: Rajeev Chandrasekhar
Chandrasekhar also addressed fears of generative AI taking away jobs, calling the notion ‘nonsense’
The minister expressed the government’s desire to have more data centres come to India and grow the Indian cloud
India is in an ‘exciting period’ when it comes to the technology space and the progress made by the country will result in future cloud systems being powered by servers made in India, according to Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar.
Speaking at the 113th annual general meeting of the industry body Southern India Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SICCI) in Chennai on Friday (July 7), Chandrasekhar said the country has developed capability, capacity and confidence in the last nine years, particularly concerning technology and innovation.
Stating that the country has ‘travelled a significant distance’ in technology advances, Chandrasekhar said, “Being a tech professional for over three decades, I can safely say that we are living in the most exciting period in the history of India.”
The MoS IT added that India has reached a point where it has become the fifth-largest economy in the world and the fastest-growing economy in the world.
At a separate event in Mumbai on Friday, Chandrasekhar also expressed the government’s desire to have more and more data centres come to India and grow the Indian cloud. The government has brought out a ‘very well-designed IT PLI’, he added.
According to Chandrasekhar, the world is seeing an ‘extremely accelerated cloudification of enterprises and individuals’, and the future clouds will be powered by made-in-India servers.
He also addressed fears of generative AI taking away jobs, calling the notion ‘nonsense’. The minister said that the generative AI tools available right now are very task-focused and Artificial General Intelligence is still a long way away.
He also added that the government’s INDIAai programme will anonymise government data and make it available to Indian startups and Indian researchers for AI research.
“Very soon we will be announcing the entire architecture of that. An India Data Management Office would be set up to specify standards for anonymisation,” the MoS IT added.
While relating to his tech entrepreneurial journey, Chandrasekhar said that the development of generative AI has two basic requirements – data set and AI computation. While data sets are available in India, the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is working with the private sector to create AI compute, he added.
Chandrasekhar’s comments on made-in-India cloud servers come days after Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced its intent to invest $12.7 Bn in its cloud infrastructure in the country, given the increased demand in India driven by the rise of the startup ecosystem.
The minister pointed out that around 830 Mn Indians use the internet today, which is set to rise to 1.2 Bn in a few years. Calling India the ‘largest connected people in the world’, the MoS IT said India has a leadership position to develop laws and protocols to ‘show the way’.
Chandrasekhar’s comments come at a time when India is working on the Digital India Act, a replacement of the IT Rules, 2002, and an overarching piece of legislation to regulate the country’s burgeoning digital economy.
