Besides domestic deployment, India wants to see AI usage in Global South: Meity Secretary

"India not just wants to use AI as something that it can do for itself, but wants to sort of take a leadership position on behalf of the global south and seeing that it is deployed across the world," the Secretary said at the Carnegie Global Technology Summit here in the national capital.

India launched the IndiaAI Mission on March 7, 2024, to bolster India's global leadership in AI and democratize the benefits of AI across all strata of society

The secretary said that India has fundamentally been flexible in its approach towards AI.

"Right from the beginning, we decided not to be doctrine and not to be dogmatic and say 'safety is the biggest concern. we have to regulate'," the secretary said.

He said India has always felt that AI is an opportunity.

"It depends on how well we use it, how we seize it, and we have to look at what the challenges are and address our challenges in making most of it," the secretary noted.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended the AI Summit in Paris. India was invited to be the co-chair at the Paris summit. Next year, India will host an AI summit.

The themes of the previous summits have been around safety and action.

"Now we believe it is time to start talking about impact (of AI)," the secretary said.

"It's been almost about two to three years of this journey, and I think many people are impatient to see actual impact, of what AI can do and what AI can deliver, and what can actually happen. And when we see, when we say impact again, I think we need to look at it in a positive framework, in terms of what it can actually deliver, the expectations and hopes in terms of what AI can do for India, a country like India, and likewise, the rest of the Global South, in terms of raising the overall productivity in various real sectors of the economy, in ensuring that there is greater efficiency and effectiveness governance, and thereby significantly improving economic growth and promoting prosperity, is the one angle that I think is foremost in India's mind and how we can actually be disruptive in enabling this through innovation," he explained how AI can have an impact on the masses.

He supplemented that India AI mission takes care the entire slew of needs for the development of an AI ecosystem. India now has about 15,000 GPU worth of compute, and adding.

He also spoke about latching AI with DPIs.

"DPI layer interacting with AI and enabling that to actually be used more widely, so that there's even more innovation, not just at the application level, but at the agent level, agentic level, in order to take it to the next stage of how it can be applied. And this is clearly something that we can share with the rest of the world where it is needed," he added.

Further, he also stressed on the need for increasing number of data centres here in India. He noted that India can be a lucrative destination for data centres.

"Data center capacities will have to come up. India is a good location where this can be created. Likewise, the compute capacity where it comes up will need to be shared with other places in the world where it requires to be created. We've had discussions with the United Nations as well to see how this could be enabled. So in that sense, India not just wants to use AI as something that it can do for itself, but wants to sort of take a leadership position on behalf of the global south and seeing that it is deployed across the world," he concluded.