IndiaAI Datasets Platform To Go Live By January To Accelerate AI Innovation

The IndiaAI Datasets Platform, a part of the IndiaAI Mission, will go live by January, National eGovernance Division (NeGD) chief executive Nand Kumarum said

The IndiaAI Datasets Platform is aimed at streamlining access to high-quality, non-personal datasets that can facilitate AI innovation

Speaking during an event, Kumarum said that the platform will mirror the US-based collaborative and open-source forum HuggingFace, where developers can create, train and deploy their models, according to a report by Economic Times.

This unified platform will serve as a repository for a diverse range of datasets, making them easily discoverable and accessible to researchers.

Highlighting the use cases of generative AI in the government, Kumarum said it can be used for drafting requests for proposals or schemes if trained on past documents, improving office productivity, and enabling easy comparison of different states’ policies.

Similarly, he added that AI trained on norms around buildings, roads, irrigation systems and others can help partly automate the verification and approval process.

Kumarum said that data from central and state governments and the private sector will be a part of IndiaAI Datasets, adding that private partnerships are a work in progress. 

This comes after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) presented a report last year suggesting that the government introduce a pricing model for sharing data, including non-personal data, under the India Dataset Platform (IDP). 

Last year, a working group of the government’s artificial intelligence (AI) think tank, IndiaAI, recommended sharing of non-personal data.

It is pertinent to note that NeGD provides the technology for the implementation of the ministry’s egovernance projects.

The union cabinet approved the IndiaAI mission in March with an allocation of INR 10,372 Cr over the next five years. The Mission aims to position India as a leader in the global AI landscape and foster technological self reliance and ethical practices. 

The Mission has six pillars – computing capacity, future skills, an innovation centre, application development initiative, startup financing, and safe and trusted AI. 

It not only aims to create 10,000 CPU Processing Units under AI computing but also emphasises creating a public-private model for funding and implementation that will further enable setting up data centres and AI services in the country. 

AI, especially GenAI, has taken the world by storm in the last few years. India is among those countries which are leveraging AI to improve efficiency and productivity. This has spawned the rise of several AI startups in the country, which offer various use cases for the emerging technology.

India is currently home to over 100 generative AI startups. These startups have also attracted a lot of investor interest. 

The Indian AI startups have raised over $600 Mn in funding since 2019. Spearheading this transition are names like SarvamAI and Krutrim, which are focused on building Indic LLMs. 

However, the capital intensity nature, long gestation period and infrastructure remain the most challenging hurdle for the AI industry in India.