AI for All: India's bold bet on public datasets

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi takes part in a global dialogue on Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance in Paris this week, co-chairing the AI Action Summit along with French President Emmanuel Macron, his IT ministry back home is getting ready to unveil key elements of a platform that the Government had envisaged as part of the ambitious Rs 10,000-crore IndiaAI Mission last year.

The Ashwini Vaishnaw-led ministry will soon unveil a unified AI library of non-personal datasets and open source tools, named ‘AI Kosh’, The CapTable has learnt. “Streamlining access to high-quality non-personal datasets for AI innovation"—as the Government put it last year—is one of the seven pillars of the IndiaAI Mission. 

As a policy aid to AI Kosh, the ministry has readied an implementation strategy paper for National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy of 2012, the aim of which is to create a repository of non-personal datasets available with the different ministries of both central and state governments. While this policy only covered government datasets, the ministry wants to expand its ambit to cover private sector data as well. 

The aim is to give researchers and startups access to vast troves of non-personal data from the public and private sectors, open source tools, and applications that can help them build AI models.