India not in a race to show prowess in supercomputing: Chandrasekhar

MoS Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Friday sat down with DH’s Shakshi Jain to discuss various matters

Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Friday sat down with DH’s Shakshi Jain to discuss the government’s progress with the Draft Personal Data Protection Bill 2022, the country’s supercomputing abilities and his thoughts on moonlighting.

(Edited excerpts)

How is the government planning to leverage our young population, not just in terms of 100% employability but also attaining global leadership?

The National Education Policy was created which says that no child will leave school without at least a minimum of four years of skilling -(class) 6 to 10 - or a maximum of six years of skilling i.e. (class) 6 to 12. That means from class 6 onwards every child will have access to some skilling programme.

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Post Covid-19 it is clear that the requirements of (the) workforce have qualitatively changed - almost every segment of the economy requires digital skills. So, in this budget the Prime Minister has announced an Rs 8,000-crore new programme under Skill India - the new phraseology is ‘future-ready’ skills.

Over the next three years we’ll do 2.5 crores of skilling, upskilling and reskilling for industry ready skills and future ready job roles across.

Does the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology plan on deploying ChatGPt and WhatsApp in unison to disseminate information on government schemes?

Neither of those things are our products, so how can we integrate ChatGPt with WhatsApp ?

In March, we are launching a very comprehensive programme called the INDIAai Programme. There will be three centres of excellence around the country in AI and - we want to be global leaders in AI. Therefore, you’ll see that there’ll be a lot of AI brought into the India stack - Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, CoWIN.

In 2020, India was home to two of the world’s 100 supercomputers. Today, it’s lost that position and has only three of the top 500. Why isn’t India’s supercomputing ability keeping pace with global progress?

The world of high performance computing is also undergoing a change. The applications that high performance computing and supercomputing used to use earlier are increasingly being used by other forms of distributed computing. There are two areas of high performance computing that we are very focussed on as a government, and our government’s vision on this starting three years ago is becoming increasingly very relevant today – one is AI computing and second one is quantum computing. So, we have a roadmap for high performance computing, but high performance computing not for the sake of saying we want to be bigger than somebody else. These are not technology demonstrations alone, we use technology keeping in mind what the end applications are. In the high performance computing space that we are getting in, AI computing is our total focus. You’ll hear in March when we launch INDIAai, our AI computing vision.

Are we not thinking from a commercialisation point of view?

Now as a government, as a people we can decide whether we want to, just for the sake of saying we’re also good in this, invest time, effort and money to play catch up, which we’re certainly doing in semiconductors. In supercomputing there a better way of doing core development between friendly countries to create platforms of the future - so, we explore that, as well as PARAM (a series of supercomputers) and expanding and pushing the performance of our family of supercomputers. We’re not giving up on supercomputers. We’re just not in a race to say we are the most powerful.

The Draft Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 was up for public consultation in January. What has been the response like?

The consultation is over - it was a 30-day consultation, we extended that almost for 60 days. And a good cross-section across the board - citizens, consumer groups, industry - everybody. And to those people who kept arguing this does not look like GDPR, this doesn’t look like this foreign act - we’ve made the case that we don’t intend to copy anybody. We’ve the largest global presence on the internet and India is fully within its right to develop its own framework. The Bill is through consultation and is currently going through the government process of getting prepared to be legislated.

What are your thoughts on moonlighting?

I don’t support moonlighting to be interpreted as a violation of a contractual agreement - moonlighting should not masquerade or be a cover for a violation of a contract between the employer and the employee. The future of tech will certainly involve (a) freelance movement where people will organise themselves into groups (and) will not want permanent jobs. They will do freelance work for one company at one time, at the same time they’ll do (work for) four other companies, as long as they have non-disclosure agreements. That is the future and companies that don’t recognise it today are failing to see the future the way it is going to be.

Could you shed light on the constitution and functioning of Grievance Appellate Committees (GACs) underscored in the IT Amendment Rules 2021?

If I am a consumer of Facebook and send a grievance to Facebook’s grievance officer - the grievance officer either doesn’t respond or sends a bland reply. Now what do I do ? We’ve got 1,300 people emailing us, saying that the grievance officer is not responding. So, I told them we’ll form a grievance appellate forum. They said we’ll do it as a self-governing, self - industry body. I said okay, you design it and come back to me. They couldn’t do it. So, we went ahead and notified three GACs.

What will happen is - I’m dissatisfied with Facebook’s argument, I’ll go to GAC, upload my complaint and the GAC will either uphold my complaint or that of the grievance officer. That’s it. And if either Facebook doesn’t like it, or I don’t like it, we can go to court.