Budget 2023: Govt throws it weight behind AI and digital empowerment

Cutting across the seven themes, presented in Budget 2023 by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, including inclusive development, reaching the last mile, infrastructure and investment, unleashing the potential, green growth, youth power, and the financial sector, the push for digital and technological transition stood out as constant.

India will set up three centres of excellence (COE) for artificial intelligence (AI) at top educational institutions to develop cutting-edge AI solutions in the country, Sitharaman highlighted the government’s focus on building localised applications for AI.

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While the Centre has been advocating the use of AI across sectors through government missions, the FM called for participation from the industry and academia, particularly developing artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G applications.

“Leading industry players will partner in conducting interdisciplinary research and develop cutting-edge applications and scalable problem solutions in areas of agriculture, health, and sustainable cities. This will galvanise an effective ecosystem and nurture quality human resources in the field," said Sitharaman

Creation of 100 labs for developing applications using 5G services, the National Data Governance policy for enabling access to anonymised data and the setting up of the DigiLocker solution for centralisation data access were some other announcements that showed the thrust of the budget was on digitisation.

Industry players called it a “forward looking budget” and welcomed the announcements.

“The centres of excellence (COE) for AI as proposed in the budget will help boost research and collaboration across sectors for inter-disciplinary use cases. The COEs will need to shift focus from experimental to applied technology, take advantage of innovation in ancillary technologies around automation and low code platforms, and drive focus on upskilling and responsible AI,” noted Purushothaman K G, Partner and Head, Digital Solutions & Telecommunications Industry Leader, KPMG in India.

As India will need more AI talent in the near future, Midhula Devabhaktuni, Co-founder and CMO of Mivi said “The new initiatives for Make AI in India and Make AI work for India will aid in the development of cutting-edge applications and scalable solutions that will help create more employment, opportunities in India.”

“Data Governance policy is going to give impetus on further helping in adoption of digital technologies and will be instrumental in growth of many more applications. Excellence centres will help in delivering government schemes like adopted technology ,blockchains and other new applications,” said Sanjay Lodha , CEO of Netweb Technologies.

In addition, a digital epigraphy museum, digitising of one lakh ancient inscriptions in the first stage was proposed.