Edapaddi K Palaniswami, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu recently announced that TamilNadu became the first state to come out with ethical artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and blockchain policies.
The announcement was made during the valedictory session of the 19th edition of Connect 2020. According to sources, Palaniswami highlighted that the state continues to be a “Destination of Choice” for the IT and IT-enabled services sector in India and stated that Tamil Nadu has been upgrading its IT infrastructure to facilitate speedy access to information and delivery of various services of the Government of Tamil Nadu to the citizens in a faster and efficient manner.
The policies go by the names Tamil Nadu Blockchain Policy, 2020, and Tamil Nadu Safe, Ethical Artificial Intelligence Policy, 2020 and Tamil Nadu Cyber Security Policy, 2020. These will be implemented by establishing and leveraging the State Family Database (SFDB) and Blockchain Backbone infrastructure.
Palaniswami said, “Even during the COVID lockdown period, we signed 42 MoUs, involving an investment of Rs 31,464 crore, and a potential to create 69,712 jobs.” He added, “This pioneering initiative will take the Government to the Citizens, thus eliminating the need for the citizens to request G2C (government to citizen) services.”
“The state would soon be rolling out Knowledge Proof Identity Based Services Delivery Project, which will revolutionise the way government services are offered to citizens. The ambitious BharatNet and TamilNet projects will be implemented to connect all 12,524 Village Panchayats of the State with minimum 1 Gbps high-speed connectivity, which will help to achieve the targets of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of United Nations,” stated Palaniswami.
In July this year, the state government has also signed an MoU with the Yotta Infrastructure, a Hiranandani Group subsidiary and a Managed Data Center service provider to set up a Data Center Park in Chennai.
