Centre to develop non-personal data collection platform for India Inc

Govt plans to develop foundational models with a capacity of more than 100 billion parameters, said Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar

As a part of the recently announced IndiaAI Mission, the Centre will develop a non-personal data collection platform, which will be accessible to Indian startups and companies, said Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Monday.

Addressing a press conference in Thiruvananthapuram, the Minister said, “For AI, data sets are the raw material. Therefore, there will be a non-personal data collection platform that will be available only for Indian startups and companies, and not for foreign companies.”

The Minister also said that the IndiaAI Mission will facilitate the development of indigenous foundational models which will be based on local Indian languages and datasets.

“We will be developing our own Indian foundational models. The world is talking about ChatGPT and OpenAI. Based on our languages and our own India datasets, we expect that as a consequence of India’s AI mission, we will have sovereign AI models that are designed and built in India.”

A sum of Rs 2,000 crore is allocated to fund Indian startups working in the domain of Artificial Intelligence, he informed.

The Union Cabinet, last week, approved the IndiaAI Mission with an outlay of Rs 10,372 crore for five years, to foster innovation in AI through public-private partnerships (PPPs).

Under the mission, the government plans to develop foundational models with a capacity of more than 100 billion parameters.

The IndiaAI Innovation Centres (IAIC) will develop AI solutions for India-specific use cases in areas like health, agriculture, education, security, governance, and language translation, according to the Minister.

He said that countries in the West that have already developed AI foundational models have an advantage. “The West has access to this kind of infrastructure. And as part of building digital infrastructure, IndiaAI will build this AI Compute infrastructure,” Chandrasekhar said.

He also announced the setting up of 10 AI labs across ten colleges in the city of Thiruvananthapuram during the press conference.

What is non-personal data?

 

Non personal data refers to any data that excludes any information identifying individuals. It includes demographic, statistical, machine-generated data and other aggregated & anonymised data that are valuable for research and analysis in various fields