Digital India should focus on AI: Nandan Nilekani

Nandan Nilekani, non-executive chairman of IT services provider Infosys opines that the government’s Digital India initiative should focus on ease of doing business and artificial intelligence (AI) over the next few years. Speaking at an event on the fifth anniversary of Digital India endeavor, Nilekani who is also the former chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), spoke about allowing enterprises to flourish with minimal human interface in government services.

“In the last few years, our focus has been on transactional efficiency, but with the kind of digitisation we are doing means that we will create massive amounts of data in the public space. The time has come to apply AI in a big way to drive insights from this, which will enable India to progress further,” he observed. Some of the areas where this technology could be applied include helping farmers take better decisions, improve tax collections and healthcare. An AI-driven system is currently being deployed by the Supreme Court to translate judicial documents from English to nine Indian languages and vice versa.