How India is shaping up its first generation of AI laws

From creating a datasets platform under India AI strategy to signing the Bletchley Declaration, regulations are the centrepiece of debates

- VERNIKA AWAL

India's tryst with regulating Artificial Intelligence (AI) has only begun and is expected to grow further as it proliferates every aspect of life. In this process, however, AI has also shown how it can be leveraged for the bad, such as in deepfakes strewn across social media. All of this has prompted the Government of India to focus on regulating AI as a standalone entity, in a bid to channel its development in the right avenues and penalise misuse.

Speaking at the recent Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)'s Global Economic Policy Forum, S Krishnan, Secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), highlighted that from the policy perspective, India believes that AI offers "more positives than negatives and must therefore be leveraged for constructive tasks.

Highlighting that AI has the potential to have a transformative industry impact the way the Industrial Revolution did, Krishnan said that it is this potential that India wants to tap into. To do this, the Centre has identified four key challenges: access to compute, building organised data sets, developing skills, and prompting nationwide and global collaborative research on Al. Of these four, while India is at par or ahead of global counterparts in data availability, skills and research, it is access to compute across enterprises that presently poses a challenge.