• A coordinated program is needed across five building blocks to capture the opportunity, Nasscom report shows.
• Key interventions needed to create a vibrant data economy in India.
• If India acts quickly, it can become the first country to launch a holistic data utilisation and AI effort, especially as countries emerge from the pandemic.

Bengaluru: Data and AI can play a strong enabling role across sectors and can add $450-$500 billion to India’s GDP by 2025, industry body Nasscom said in a report.

According to the ‘Unlock Value from Data and AI: The Indian Opportunity’ report, Covid-19 has brought to the fore the importance of digital technologies including data and artificial intelligence in addressing the healthcare crisis, restarting supply chains, enabling online education and almost every aspect of the economy.

“Digital India has enabled the country to become a rapid consumer of data and digital adoption in India is accelerating,” Debjani Ghosh, President of a not-for-profit organisation Nasscom, said.

Learning from best practices of countries, she said a coordinated program is needed across five building blocks – strategy, data, technology stack, talent and execution to capture this opportunity.

The report also focuses on the key interventions needed to create a vibrant data economy in India that span across identifying datasets of national importance, build a data marketplace and define data standards and governance.

Recommendations reviewed

The recommendations have been reviewed by industry leaders including N. Chandrasekaran, Chairman of Tata Sons, Rishad Premji, Chairman of Wipro and Anant Maheshwari, President of Microsoft India. Debjani Ghosh President of Nasscom and recommendations were also presented to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

 “We are confident that a well-structured and executed data strategy can aid India growth and enable India to leverage its data richness for societal and economic benefits to the country,” Ghosh said.

If India acts quickly, she said that it can become the first country to launch a holistic data utilisation and AI effort, especially as countries emerge from the pandemic.

Healthcare is an obvious example, but she said that workforce planning and protection, doubling farmer income, water management, financial health and support for MSMEs – all these and many more can be supported with an effective data utilisation strategy.

At the same time, “we need to incentivise R&D and innovation to solve for India, accelerate India’s journey as a global hub for data analytics and AI and catalyse innovate startups,” she said.

“A coordinated program across all five building blocks is required to capture the opportunity. Investments in data and AI can be self-sustaining. This is valuable as economic revival can cause fiscal pressures.

“While India has strengths to capitalise, delays could result in only partial value realisation. There is potential to accelerate India’s progress. This paper suggests options that could be considered and actioned within months for visible results,” she said.

India is becoming a digital leader on the foundation of JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) with around 80% of India’s adult population holds a bank account, over 450 million citizens have mobile internet access and 1.25 billion are biometrically registered.

All of this translates into an enormous amount of data, considering it is estimated that 1.7MB of data is being created every second for every human being on earth.

“This data holds the potential to transform the delivery of government services, create inclusive policies, and make Indian enterprises globally competitive,” Ghosh said.

However, she said that various factors are inhibiting the utilisation of this data to solve national problems – there is a high variance in the quality and usability of key datasets in India, because of limited data policies and weak enforcement of the existing ones.

Aggregating data from public and private sector

“Datasets in India exist in silos and are disaggregated across public-sector platforms. This limits their discovery and leads to the creation of duplicate datasets and incompatible data models,” Ghosh said.

To enable data utilisation, the report said that data sets could be made available on a data marketplace that aggregates data from public and private sector, and is equipped with suitable data governance (classification, access rules and quality control) and privacy controls implemented.

“Data shall only be collected with user consent and should be anonymised before being made available on the data marketplace. Further, accelerating AI uptake requires a robust technology stack that will allow users to enrich the data on the marketplace, host open source solutions and AI models, and run AI models or bigdata analysis using computing infrastructure,” the report said.

Although India has 1600 deep-tech startups, with the deep tech startup pool growing at 40 per cent annual growth rate from 2014, Ghosh said the pace of AI innovation lags leading economies.

“An ecosystem of innovation involving industry bodies, startups and academia could be crucial to accelerate data and AI efforts,” she said.