Karnataka bets on AI suite to offset staff crunch, improve services

Some of the services being developed will be hosted on aicell.karnataka.gov.in for public use.

Bengaluru: Karnataka is developing an artificial intelligence (AI) suite to automate routine office tasks such as translations and document management, to boost productivity as around one-third of government jobs lie vacant. 

The first phase of the AI suite will also see the deployment of chatbots on public portals to interact with citizens and “reduce manual workload”. 

Some of the services being developed as part of the AI suite will be hosted on aicell.karnataka.gov.in for public use.

“We have already hosted several services. In the coming days, we’re developing more services to enhance productivity in the government. The AI suite will be fully operationalised in two to three months,” Shreevyas H M, project director for AI and ML at the Centre for e-Governance, told DH. 

A machine translation software called Kannada Kasturi is ready. It has been developed using 23 million English-Kannada parallel sentences, according to the government. The conversion of English portable document formats (PDF) to Kannada is already live. 

The AI suite will have a writing assistant, which will help officers prepare letters, procedures and official documents.

Speech-to-text, optical character recognition (OCR), and live transliteration, among other tools, are under development.

All these tools combined are expected to make work faster in the government, which is notorious for sluggish pace. For example, issuing one government order, which takes days and typically involves multiple personnel handling numerous files, may become faster.

With the AI suite, departments will no longer need to depend on private commercial services for translations, OCR and other language-related tasks, the government said. 

Karnataka has 2.84 lakh jobs vacant against a strength of 7.76 lakh, leaving the government operating with 64% of its sanctioned workforce. 

“What we’re doing will help make up for the gap,” Shreevyas said when asked about AI disrupting the workforce in the government. “We can definitely redeploy existing resources to carry out more productive work instead of doing mundane functions,” he said.

Revenue Minister Krishna Byre Gowda, a reformist, offered a pragmatic view on AI leading to better resource planning in the government. 

"Firstly, we've not even scratched the surface when it comes to using AI for people-friendly service delivery. Many services can be automated or rationalised," Gowda said. "However, when accountability mechanisms in government are rather weak, I don't see any resource disruption. All the modest improvements we've achieved haven't resulted in any reassessment of resources," he said. "In this context, what I can really hope for is better service delivery if not resource efficiency or redeployment."