With the Narendra Modi-led BJP government coming in power the second time, the traditional “sarkari” attitude of the bureaucrats also seems to be changing. The Indian government now has a seemingly refreshed view towards emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science and cloud computing, with the NDA government focussing on advancing the infrastructure.

One of the key projects in this area is the ₹7,000 crore cloud platform AIRAWAT or AI Research, Analytics and knoWledge Assimilation plaTform. The platform will be focused squarely towards big data analytics and similar tasks and will serve many functions. It will support multi-tenant multi-user computing with resource partitioning, dynamic computing environment and many more features expected from modern cloud environments. In addition to this, the system is also set to be energy-efficient, due to a highly space and power-efficient design. There is also an accompanying software stack for common AI Tasks such as an SDK for training and inferencing, frameworks, libraries and more.

Another interesting development is the recently-concluded National Conference on e-Governance (NCeG) also saw a very interesting dialogue and projects. Over the course of two days, discussions were held on six sub-themes in plenary sessions:

1. India Enterprise Architecture (INDEA)
2. Digital Infrastructure
3. Inclusion and capacity building
4. Emerging Technology for Practitioners
5. Secretariat Reforms
6. National e-Governance Service Delivery Assessment (NeSDA)

Despite the productive dialogue, numerous industry insiders are still questioning the bureaucrats’ job-readiness to adapt and use these technologies. However, most tech giants are more than happy to be helping.

Peter Moore, Regional Managing Director for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Global Public Sector — APAC and Japan, told a noted news wire, “This is the right time to skill them, train them in AI-enabled Cloud computing so that India can move faster on embracing new-age technologies. We have had successful meetings with senior government leaders on this subject as AWS is already leading in skilling the students and upskilling the workforce in the country.”

Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services, added, “It is high time the Indian government deploys AI and Machine Learning-driven Cloud models to make sense of the humongous sets of data. Training is a crucial part of this exercise.”

The Government has been working with noted names like Microsoft and Google to foster growth for India’s nascent AI and ML ecosystem.