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A seminar on artificial intelligence (AI) for digital transformation was held in Kerala, attended by over 42 officials from 13 state departments. The two-day intensive workshop aimed to empower IT teams operating under different departments, enabling them to ensure the continued adoption and implementation of state-of-the-art technology initiatives within the region.
The participants included representatives from the Departments, including the State Digital Health Mission, the Department of Agriculture Development and Farmers Welfare, Animal Husbandry, State Goods and Service Tax, Rural Development, Dairy Development, and the Police Department.
The National e-Governance Division, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, is providing State Capacity Building Workshops through its Capacity Building Scheme, in cooperation with their knowledge partners.
The objective of these workshops is to clarify the potential of emerging technologies in enhancing service delivery and to guide participants in formulating policies and strategies that can adapt to the ever-evolving digital landscapes.
The workshop in Kerala was inaugurated by Dr Rathan U Kelkar, Secretary of the Electronics and IT Department, and Nima Arora, Director of KSITM, in the presence of officials from NeGD and the Wadhwani Institute of Technology and Policy (WITP). The Secretary emphasised that the workshop would play a pivotal role in harnessing these technologies for more effective and efficient governance within the state.
The Director stressed that this workshop has the potential to bring about a significant transformation in the day-to-day operations of officers. This, in turn, will assist government officials in making informed decisions regarding the implementation of the most suitable emerging technologies to address the specific needs of their respective departments.
The workshop brought together a group of subject matter experts from both industry and government to facilitate interactive sessions that addressed critical challenges within the state, showcasing real-life use cases, providing demonstrations of various tools, and outlining a vision for translating ideas into tangible proof of concepts, pilot projects, or full-fledged initiatives.
Launched in August this year, these workshops are unique collaborations between the government and an industry consortium. They aim to empower the government to effectively leverage emerging technologies to enhance the delivery of public services, bolster governance, and enable more informed decision-making. More workshops in Kerala have been scheduled to revolve around data-driven decision-making for governance and cloud computing.
India recently announced the unveiling of the first IndiaAI report, which is a roadmap to advance AI in the country and help achieve the government’s aim for India to have a one trillion-dollar digital economy.
As OpenGov Asia reported, IndiaAI adopts a mission-oriented strategy to systematically address gaps in the current AI ecosystem, focusing on computing infrastructure, data, AI financing, research, innovation, targeted skilling, and institutional capacity for data.
It is made up of several components, including the India Datasets Programme, which will serve as one of the most extensive repositories of anonymised datasets that will be used by Indian researchers to train their multi-parameter models. Another component is the India AI Compute Platform, a collaborative initiative between the public and private sectors to create significant GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) capacity to support startups and researchers. In addition to skilling, IndiaAI will also support the development of AI chips in partnership with the Semicon India programme.
