UNESCO, MeitY launch exercise to assess India's AI readiness

Hindustan Times

16 hours ago

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), and law firm Ikigai Law (as the implementing partner) have launched a diagnostic exercise to assess India's artificial intelligence (AI) readiness.
The exercise will involve UNESCO's AI Readiness Assessment Methodology (RAM), a multi-dimensional tool aligned with the global standards set per the UN agency's 2021 recommendation on the Ethics of AI.
The RAM, an extensive questionnaire, will assess India's AI preparedness in legal, socio-cultural, scientific and educational, economic, and technical/infrastructure aspects.
Five consultations, each featuring breakout sessions on AI ethics, have been held over seven months as part of the process. A final stakeholder consultation was held in Delhi on Tuesday.
People familiar with the matter said participants highlighted the lack of a unified data-sharing policy across states, the Centre, and private players, the lack of data interoperability, and the importance of being cautious with AI outputs.
There was consensus that AI cannot function independently of intellectual property. A person aware of the discussions said models such as ChatGPT blur the lines between public domain and copyrighted material, prompting calls to revisit copyright law designed for the print era.
The exercise will culminate in a report highlighting what is working, what is missing, and what can be done better by the year-end. 'The report will help us outline a strategy towards a safe, trustworthy, and responsible AI,' said MeitY additional secretary and India AI Mission CEO Abhishek Singh. He added that the exercise is meant to promote a pro-innovation approach with light-touch regulation focused on preventing user harm.
Singh said four Indian startups have been selected to build foundation models tailored to local needs. He cited efforts to boost compute capacity to 34,000 GPUs and expand access to datasets through the AI Kosha platform.
Ten countries have completed RAM reports. The assessment is underway in 72 others to identify gaps and opportunities in AI readiness, said UNESCO's Eunsong Kim. 'India is quite a unique story in the RAM conversation, because it is vast and diverse. It is also extremely vibrant in the AI ecosystem,' said Kim.
Kim explained how the RAM reports benefited other nations, citing Chile's case, where the exercise improved cybersecurity, data protection, and digital policy. The process led to an AI task force and a national AI action plan in Indonesia, which is creating its RAM report.
Experts cautioned that India's unique social and cultural complexities demand a deeper, more localised understanding, even as the RAM exercise offers a structured global framework.
'I do not think we fully understand the socio-economic impact AI will have on a country like India,' said Indian Institute of Technology Madras Centre for Responsible AI head B Ravindran. 'We talk about bias mitigation and explainability, often through a Western lens. But bias in India is far more complex than in the US. It is not just black and white, but every shade in between. And we have not systematically recorded that.'