India’s AI Mission Gets Go-Ahead: Will It Change The Future Of Education?

India’s ambitious artificial intelligence (AI) mission will now be a reality as the Ministry of Electronics and IT(MeitY) has reportedly received a go-ahead to roll out the five-year programme.

With this programme, the government aims to provide a platform for students to attain AI skills and give access to relevant AI tools so that they can be future-ready for the digital revolution. The government had earlier launched the ‘Responsible AI For Youth’ programme which will help in reducing the skill gap in students and make them AI-ready. This programme is for students from class 8 to class 12 in central and state government schools.

These students will be selected on the basis of online training sessions and further, they will be taught to identify ideas which could have an impact on social issues and can be made using AI. The top participants will get the chance to attend boot camps or online sessions for deeper knowledge on AI principles. The AI programme is deeply tied to the National Education Policy. 

This year, the government had launched ai.gov.in to disseminate information on all AI-related developments in the country. This would include information on startups, investment funds, resources, companies, education institutions and other resources related to AI in India and it will also share documents, case studies and research reports, among other useful study material.

MeitY is said to implement the mission while Niti Aayog will also be a part of the project, according to an ET report.

Using the grant, MeitY wanted to launch a national AI portal, which can develop applications and implement AI in the areas of health and education. However, NITI Aayog wanted to invest in setting up five centres of research excellence, 20 institutional centres for transformational AI and a cloud computing platform, AIRAWAT.

The latter is India’s first AI-specific cloud computing infrastructure, which would guide the research into new and emerging technologies as well as their development. AIRAWAT is said to be established based on the recommendations from the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence (NSAI). Under AIRAWAT, the government plans to tackle the high-impact challenges associated with lack of access to computing resources. Going ahead, the government will be building a compute infrastructure for all the stakeholders involved in the AI research and application ecosystem, including startups, students, researchers and government organisations among others.

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