Govt sets up panel to resolve dispute between MeitY and Niti Aayog over AI mission

India Government has been quite vocal about its ambition to building businesses around emerging technologies such as Artifical Intelligence and blockchain in the last couple of years.

Though, it never got to a stage of executing and implementing their plans. Primarily because of a tussle between government departments NITI Aayog and the ministry of electronics and IT (Meity).

Months after intervention sought on the matter, finally, the government has formed a committee to resolve their differences.

The panel is formed to resolve the overlaps between Niti Aayog's and Meity plans, said ET report quoting a govt official.

It will be headed by principal scientific advisor K VijayRaghavan and represented by the secretary in the department of science and technology, the CEO of Niti Aayog and secretary of MeitY.

In August inter-ministerial meet, MeitY had raised apprehension over the numerous overlaps committed by the NITI Aayog related to AI road map.

The committee, to expedite the process related to AI mission, will assign and specify roles to avoid overlapping among the govt departments.

Niti Aayog has already got a green signal from the expenditure finance committee (EFC) for a budget of Rs 7,000 crore

It plans to go as per its road map laid out last year, to build five centres of research excellence, 20 institutional centres for transformational AI and cloud computing platform called AIRAWAT.

Whereas in January, MeitY had announced to set up national AI centre. It had sent a separate Rs 400 crore proposal to the EFC.

Last year, former FM Arun Jaitley had talked about establishing a national programme on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

At present, India’s capabilities in AI research are very limited. The research communities are instead confined to a handful of academic institutes and rely on individual brilliance rather than institutional competence.

Globally, AI adoption is still in its early days. Close to over 80% of firms are either using AI extensively or have plans for use soon.

US is ahead of its peers in AI. China, which is catching up fast, aims to be a world leader in AI by 2030.

According to a Nasscom study, by 2022, about 46% of the Indian workforce will be engaged in entirely new jobs that do not exist today or jobs that have radically changed skill sets.