The Covid 19 pandemic has propelled the transition towards digital technologies and heightened use of the internet. According to the latest IAMAI-Kantar Cube report, the number of active internet users in India is likely to grow nearly 45 percent, i.e., 900 million, by 2025 compared to 622 million last year. Moreover, the report suggests an increasing number of digital users in rural areas than urban, hinting towards the massive revolution in India’s digital ecosystem.
It is startling to note that a large proportion of the Indian population, even with internet access, is not well acquainted with simple digital skills like online searches. Furthermore, digital adoption for everyday functioning by corporates, schools, universities, MSMEs, start-ups, Govt. offices, and others have pronounced the need for a digitally savvy population. As the world increasingly moves towards digital, India needs to bridge the gap to ensure the power of digital technologies is unleashed to benefit all citizens equally and to further boost economic growth.
India’s journey to digital inclusion started with the implementation of the world’s largest identity project, Aadhaar, giving all citizens a platform to have a digital identity which could open the door to plethora of opportunities. Over the past few years, increased adoption of emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), IoT and Big Data, is paving the way for a more digitally inclusive society that ensures employment, independence, and overall well-being of people from different strata of society without any bias. Since last couple of decades, India’s technology service industry is at forefront and driving technologies enabled business transformation across the world. With the initiatives like Aadhar, Aatma Nirbhar Bharat and Digital India together with technologies like Data Analytics and AI, India is not transforming digitally but leading the global market.
Technology has been one of the critical drivers for sectors like agriculture, healthcare, education, retail, and manufacturing. This is empowered by an uptick of robust applications, intelligent devices, and a surge in data-centric innovations. Moreover, with cloud technologies reaching new capacity levels to process millions of computers combined with millions of algorithms, more unique opportunities are being created to boost citizens’ progress fueling India’s ambition to become a trillion-dollar digital economy by the end of this decade. Major growth drivers of the market are adoption of industry 4.0, use of advanced technologies, such as cloud, IoT, big data and analytics, mobility, and social media. Innovations around Data Analytics and AI are the most critical factor in driving business strategy and growth to bring the impact in digital transformation journey.
The Government of India in its Budget of 2018–19 had prioritized building technology capabilities and initiated a national programme to direct the efforts of the Government in the area of artificial intelligence. NITI Aayog released India’s National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence (NSAI) in June 2018 called “AI for All”, combines the economic potential of AI with social development and inclusive growth, and positions India as the ‘AI Garage of the World’. With the vision to incorporate AI in youth, MeitY along with Industry participation has launched National AI Portal functions as a one-stop platform for all the AI-related advancements in India, along with sharing of important resources such as articles, as well as information on AI-based companies and educational firms in India.
The application of AI in day-to-day life is endless. For example, intelligent and connected sensors installed on water sources can help determine and manage drinking water quality for the population. AI application in different sectors is creating a more inclusive, safe, secure society where everyone has equal opportunities to reach their full potential.
AI can help converting Smart Cities into Intelligent Cities by meeting the rapidly increasing demand of urbanising population and providing them with enhanced quality of life, better traffic control to reduce congestion and enhance security using improved crowd management. Similarly by providing Text-to-speech and text translation systems, AI in E-Pathshala can to aid easy availability of learning material across the diverse Indian languages as well encourage interoperability of teachers across states.
AI in E-Prison using video analytics platform can help in identifying violations and illegal activities and flag them to the officials for swift action. In agriculture, AI/ML together with Image recognition, and drone technology can help to monitor crops, predict yields, encourage precision farming, stabilise yield, analyse soil quality, predict economic gains from future yields. In addition to above, Predict advisories for weather, sowing, pest control, input control to help increase the farmer’s income.
he Government of India (GOI) has launched Project Insight leveraging machine learning to track frauds and black money.
- Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) is another area where AI can help to track and analyse the tax evasion problem along with its application in eGovernance and to ease compliance burden.
- The Government of India (GOI) has launched Project Insight leveraging machine learning to track frauds and black money.
- AI could benefit Khoya paya portal y integrating Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS), to ensure seamless exchange of information to avert and solve crimes, find missing persons and apprehend delinquents.
- Swachh Bharat App uses AI to ascertain the beneficiary through facial recognition software and digitally affirming the state of toilets, and cross-checks photos with the GPS coordinates shared by the smartphones.
- IRCTC Connect uses AI-enabled chatbot called ‘Ask Disha’ in English and Hindi to help solve text-based queries and voice-based queries of users.
While government has special focus and launched several initiative to adopt AI in different areas, other sectors are also prioritizing their business by adopting AI. Some of the early adopters and areas are listed below :
BFSI
BFSI sector is gradually opening up to adapt innovative solution to transform banking system and with the Government initiatives like Jan Dhan Yojana, UPI, BharatNet mission which is driving internet adoption across India, adoption of AI is increasing. Areas where AI can play crucial role include:
- Digital Services to gain a competitive advantage, drive efficiencies, and improve customer experience
- Robotics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to enhance on-demand customer experience and satisfaction
- Adoption of algorithms in Investments to increase portfolio returns and reduce risks, both for institutional and retail investors
- AI-based financial management tools to deliver personalized financial management advice and alerts to customers
- Smart transaction analysis programs and tools to detect fraud and money-laundering transactions
Industrial sector
AI is a core element of the Industry 4.0 revolution and use cases are spread across different areas like:
- AI-driven design and blueprinting enables the development of digital prototypes before the production phase
- Real-time predictive maintenance to reduce unplanned machine downtime
- AI based visual inspection for manufacturing detects , anomalies and real-time tracking and recall of defective equipment
- AI based market demands prediction using location, socioeconomic and macroeconomic factors, weather patterns, political status, consumer behaviour and other data elements
- Optimize manufacturing supply chains, to anticipate market changes
Healthcare
The application of emerging technologies has empowered our medical fraternity to tackle the Covid19 pandemic. The predictive analysis of diseases is an important area where AI is currently being utilized. Though it is at a nascent stage now, with the right harnessing of data, doctors will devise the onset of diseases like dengue or malaria in regions and allocate hospital staff accordingly.
Another area of focus here is the healthcare insurance sector. Despite the regulations in place, health insurance frauds are evolving rampant—vertical coalition. Again, AI-powered intelligent systems can help identify growing fraud.
According to the NASSCOM report ‘Implications of AI on the Indian Economy,’ on average, a unit increase in AI intensity by companies that use AI can contribute US$ 67.25 billion — or 2.5 percent of India’s GDP — to the Indian economy in the near term.
The initial AI concepts were developed in the 1950s, but it is only now that its ubiquitous application can be undertaken for human benefit. In the AI era, India has an opportunity to leverage its unique strengths of technology, data volume, data diversity, and talent to build a digitally inclusive society in the truest sense.
Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com
