Latest news with #DataEmpowermentandProtectionArchitecture
Indian Express
17-05-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
India's IPL moment in AI: A bid for global leadership
Written by Vilas Dhar Sam Altman's AI-generated image of himself as a cricket batsman in India's iconic blues seemed like a playful social media moment. Yet, it highlighted an emerging truth: India's surging presence on the global AI stage. Many once doubted India's AI ambitions. Today, it stands as a serious contender for global leadership. The parallel with cricket is telling. The Indian Premier League (IPL) transformed cricket worldwide through clear vision, strategic investment, local talent development and welcoming global stars, all while making cricket exciting for diverse audiences. Within a decade, India created one of the world's most vibrant and valuable sporting ecosystems. India's approach to AI follows a similar blueprint. Here, too, India plays to win. India's Triple Advantage: Computing Power, Data, and Talent India's new AI computing resource gives 15 million developers access to powerful processing chips at half the global rate, less than $1.25 per hour instead of the typical $2.50-$3.00. This dramatically lowers barriers for entrepreneurs who previously couldn't afford the computing power needed for AI development. As part of this effort, the government has announced that Sarvam, a homegrown startup, will leverage this infrastructure to build India's first sovereign foundational model. Designed for deep reasoning and fluency in Indian languages, the model will serve the scale and diversity of India's population in real-world deployment. The country's 1.4 billion citizens generate about 20 per cent of the world's data, providing essential raw material for AI systems. The government has organised this advantage through AIKosha, a platform with hundreds of datasets and AI models that developers can use immediately. Unlike most countries, India has created a sophisticated framework that balances individual privacy with innovation. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, has gained global recognition for balancing individual privacy with technological innovation. At the same time, the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) is uniquely giving citizens control over how their personal information is managed and shared for technological advancement. Its approach gives citizens control over their personal information while allowing its use for technological advancement. As global data becomes more restricted, this Indian citizen-centred model becomes increasingly valuable. Perhaps most importantly, India boasts remarkable talent growth. In 2024, AI hiring increased by over 33 per cent, second only to the US. According to Stanford University research, India's AI talent pool has grown faster than any other country, expanding by 252 per cent. This reflects how quickly its workforce is adapting to AI opportunities. Each year, 25,000 engineers graduate from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. India also produces the largest group of computer science master's students and the second-largest group of computer science PhD students from American universities. The government is now creating specialised AI research centres – Centres of Excellence – to attract both domestic and global experts. The Indian Approach: Openness and Collaboration What makes India different is its approach. Unlike China's state-directed AI strategy or America's private-sector dominance, India's model combines government infrastructure with open collaboration, creating a distinctly democratic path to AI development. While many tech ecosystems guard their innovations, India embraces openness. By promoting shared standards and inclusive development, India creates an environment where ideas can emerge from anywhere. Recent open-source AI breakthroughs show how this approach accelerates innovation and shares benefits widely. India's success with digital public infrastructure demonstrates this collaborative spirit. Its digital identity system now covers 1.3 billion people, while its payment system handles 17 billion transactions monthly for 450 million users. By 2030, these systems are expected to add 3-4 per cent to India's GDP. The same collaborative approach could give India an edge in AI development. From Potential to Reality With these foundations in place, India must now convert potential into concrete benefits for its citizens and the global community to demonstrate the possibilities of a new 'third way.' The transformation begins by extending AI beyond metropolitan centres through targeted literacy programs and region-specific solutions. This geographic inclusivity ensures all communities participate in and benefit from AI advancements, preventing the concentration of technological power in already-privileged areas. Simultaneously, India must balance cultivating homegrown expertise with attracting global talent. Competitive research fellowships and strengthened industry-academic partnerships can create a thriving ecosystem where domestic innovation flourishes alongside international collaboration. The country should leverage this intellectual capital to tackle fundamental research challenges that plague current AI systems. By addressing factual accuracy, reasoning capabilities and computational efficiency, India can position itself as a centre for meaningful innovation rather than incremental improvement. This focus on foundational breakthroughs would distinguish India's contributions in an increasingly crowded field where superficial advances often overshadow substantive progress. As AI computing demands grow, with data centres potentially consuming 21 per cent of global energy by 2030, India's leadership in renewable energy becomes strategically vital. With nearly half its power capacity already coming from clean sources, India can establish international benchmarks for sustainable AI development. Perhaps most importantly, India must pioneer governance frameworks that balance innovation with societal well-being. Drawing on its experience building inclusive digital systems, India can develop approaches that protect individual rights while promoting collective benefits. This balanced governance would ensure that AI advancement serves humanity while accelerating technological capacity, a distinction that could ultimately define India's contribution to global AI development. The Long Game When the IPL launched in 2008, few predicted its global impact. India's AI journey follows a similar path: the vision is clear, the talent is ready and the infrastructure is in place. Now comes the exciting part: building AI solutions that take India from a rising competitor to a global leader. When I heard Prime Minister Modi speak at the Paris AI Action Summit, one line stayed with me: 'No one holds the key to our collective future and shared destiny other than us.' Reflecting among global leaders and technologists, I was reminded that success in AI isn't about winning the first innings – or even the first match. It's about building the kind of pitch where everyone has a chance to innovate, contribute, and thrive. Vilas Dhar is a global AI policy expert and President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, a philanthropy focused on exploration, enhancement and development of AI and data science for the common good. Views expressed are personal
Mint
13-05-2025
- Health
- Mint
Use verifiable credentials to grant us agency over our digital data
Back in the day, all we had to rely on were paper records. When we visited a doctor, we carried along with us a file containing all our medical records—prescriptions, diagnostic results, etc, for the doctor to review before treating what currently ailed us. When we went to our bank, it was always with passbook in hand, so that the history of our transactions could be manually updated in its pages for our record. This allowed us to do with this information what we pleased. If we needed a second opinion, we carried that same file to a new doctor so that he or she could read through it without needing to speak to our primary physician. If we applied for a loan from some other bank, we simply showed them our passbook so that they could assure themselves of our creditworthiness. Also Read: Mint Quick Edit | Digital access: A welcome new basic right Over time, as these systems became more digital, the organizations we interacted with offered us new conveniences. They built digital systems that stored our data and designed internet portals and mobile applications we could use to access and interact with them. Eventually, these organizations came to realize that this data was valuable and, in order to preserve their competitive advantage, began to make the data hard for others to access. In the process, it also denies us, those to whom that data pertains, the ability to properly avail ourselves of it. Countries around the world have found different ways to address this problem. Europe included the right to data portability in its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), allowing residents to invoke this right in order to access their personal data that happens to be under the control of a data fiduciary. Other countries built large population-scale digital infrastructure to enable data transfers—in Australia, this is called the Consumer Data Rights initiative, and in India, the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA). Today, these digital infrastructure projects are considered among the most important elements of a country's digital public infrastructure (DPI) stack, making up, along with digital identities and payments, the holy trinity of DPI implementation. As currently envisaged, they connect different isolated systems to each other so as to enable data in one silo to be moved to another. Also Read: India's Digital Data Protection rules: A story of hits and misses To work properly, we have to ensure that the digital system of a given organization is capable of interacting with that of every other one that it needs to share data with, communicating in a language they all understand. We do this by putting in place Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), simple schema that all entities have to align with in order to understand data requests made by any one of them and be able to respond in a useful way. Despite the success we have had, this system-to-system approach is hard to implement at scale. Getting multiple organizations of different sizes and technical capabilities to align their digital applications with the requirements of these APIs takes months, sometimes years. And while we may have managed to pull this off in the financial services sector, it will be much harder to do so in others. A recent paper by FIDE suggests that the answer might lie in going back to where we started. When we only had paper records to rely on, we carried copies of our personal data with us. This self-custodial approach allowed us to use our information as we wanted and to share it with whomever we chose. If we can replicate this concept in the digital realm, we can regain agency over what is done with our data while still availing the benefits that digital systems provide. A verifiable credential is a cryptographically secure digital representation of the claims made by an issuer (say a bank) about a subject (such as the financial records of a customer) that is presented in a tamper-evident format capable of being independently verified without relying on its issuer. While we may not have realized it, we deal with verifiable credentials all the time. During covid, for example, the credentials of the digital vaccination certificates we carried could be verified using a QR code. All the contents of our DigiLocker—digital versions of our driver's licences, PAN cards and other government documents—are verifiable credentials, as are the aircraft boarding passes we place in the DigiYatra app for smooth airport security clearance. Also Read: India needs a systemic transformation to secure its digital future If banks can provide us with personal information such as our bank statements and other financial records in the form of verifiable credentials, they will no longer have to worry whether the organizations seeking access to it have actually obtained our consent to use it. By giving us custody of that information in a robust machine-readable format, it is up to us to share it with whoever we choose. At the same time, since verifiable credentials are cryptographically guaranteed not to have been tampered with, recipients can trust that their contents are authentic. This establishes a user-centric, self-custodial solution to the data sharing problem that is easily scalable across ecosystems as they digitize. APIs made data portable for institutions. Verifiable credentials will do that for users at a fraction of the cost. If we can get every bank, hospital and telecom company to issue verifiable credentials, we can reclaim agency over our data without the need for massive back-end systems that facilitate this. We will need legislative and regulatory support to make this possible. But that should not be too much to ask. The author is a partner at Trilegal and the author of 'The Third Way: India's Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance'. His X handle is @matthan.
