Indian Govt. Officially Launch Their First Artificial Intelligence Portal

Navin Bondade 1 Comment Artificial Intelligence

On the occasion of the first anniversary of the second tenure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government, Union Minister for Electronics and IT, Law, and Justice and Communications Ravi Shankar Prasad on Saturday launched India’s national Artificial Intelligence Portal.

The major goal of this Artificial Intelligence Portal is to serve as a one-stop platform for all Artificial Intelligence-related advancements in India, with sharing of useful resources like articles, investment funding news for AI startup, AI companies, and educational firms on AI in India.

This will act as a knowledge hub for students, who can easily access all the documents, case studies, research reports, etc. from the portal. The portal also has a section about learning and new job roles related to AI.

According to sources, the team is also working on investor pitch events in the future and looking to make data sources available through the portal. The portal will also distribute documents, case studies, research reports, etc, and provide learning and new job roles related to AI.

AI Portal has been jointly developed by the Ministry of Electronics and IT & IT Industry. National e-Governance Division of Ministry of Electronics & IT and NASSCOM from the IT industry will jointly run this portal.

The portal brings together ideas & thought leadership from Indian government stakeholders including Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, NITI Aayog, NASSCOM, along with state governments.

Such government arms can finally interact with private players, including large tech companies, venture capital funds, startups and educational institutions on the portal to realize the potential of AI too.

One of the most talked-about sections is regarding skills and jobs meant to help professionals learn and find work in the field of AI. For example, there are currently AI courses available on the platform, both free and paid for things like AI Foundation, Machine Learning, Data Visualization, etc.

This, according to the government officials, will help in upskilling and understanding of the technology at the core levels of the workforce. These courses are mostly provided by either educational institutions such as IIT Bombay, third party content providers like SkillUp, and edX or private companies like IBM.

The other big learning initiatives mentioned on the portal include CBSE’s partnership with chipmaker giant Intel. The AI education program is open to students in classes 8-12 across thousands of schools in India.

The minister also announced the Responsible AI for Youth Programme, which is aimed at imparting education and skills in AI to students in government schools.

The Ministry said, “The aim of this programme is to give the young students of our country a platform and empower them with appropriate new age tech mindset, relevant AI skill-sets and access to required AI tool-sets to make them digitally ready for the future.

The programme has been created and launched by the National e-Governance Division, Ministry of Electronics, and IT in collaboration with Intel India, with support from the Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSE&L), Ministry of Human Resource Development.

Addressing the media at the launch event, Prasad said “India must be a leading country in the development of Artificial Intelligence in the world, leveraging upon its vast Internet-savvy population and data it is creating. India’s AI approach should be of inclusion and empowerment of human beings by supplementing growth and development rather than making human beings less relevant.”

“The national programme is open to students of classes 8 – 12 from Central and State government-run schools (including KVS, NVS, JNV) from across the country and aims to bring about a change in the thought process and create a bridge for the digital divide.

The programme will be implemented in a phase-wise manner and in its first phase, each of the State Education Department will nominate 10 teachers as per the eligibility criteria. Teachers may also self nominate themselves by fulfilling the eligibility criteria.

These teachers will be provided orientation sessions aimed to help them understand the premise and identify 25-50 potential students for the programme. The identified students will attend online training sessions on AI and understand how to identify social impact ideas/projects that may be created using AI and submit their ideas through a 60 seconds video explaining a proposed AI-enabled solution,” the statement read.