The numbers

Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Jitin Prasada answered a Lok Sabha question in writing on Wednesday, and the reply is a useful snapshot of where the national AI programme actually is. The Centre has approved 58 AI Centres of Excellence and 543 Data & AI Labs. The IndiaAI Mission has separately identified 762 AI use cases across 62 ministries.

Centres of Excellence

The 58 AI-CoEs go across states and union territories, each built with the relevant state or UT government and industry partners. Tamil Nadu has two of them under the approved framework.

Where the labs are going

The 543 Data & AI Labs sit under the IndiaAI FutureSkills pillar, and their siting is the part worth noticing: ITIs and polytechnics in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. Training covers AI, data annotation, data curation and applied data science — the work that actually exists in volume, not just model building. Tamil Nadu gets 18 labs.

Fellowships

FutureSkills also pays for fellowships at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. 686 have been awarded nationally across 178 institutions. Tamil Nadu accounts for 162 of those: 96 undergraduate, 34 postgraduate, 32 PhD.

From a workshop to a pipeline

The IndiaAI Application Development Initiative ran a workshop on AI in public service delivery in April. The point was to get ministries and departments to audit their own data capabilities, find candidate use cases, and write AI roadmaps for governance and service delivery.

Prasada said IADI now has a pipeline of AI solutions in healthcare, agriculture, governance, climate, cybersecurity and financial regulation, with routes from ideation to pilot deployment and on to scale.

A safety institute

An IndiaAI Safety Institute is being set up as a hub for indigenous R&D in AI safety, meant to build up India's technical and institutional capacity for AI governance.

Source: ANI News