New Delhi: The new government, which took charge on Monday, is likely to carry forward key IT policies that it enacted or proposed in its previous term, people aware of the matter said, as India aims to overhaul its legal frameworks to adapt to a rapidly-evolving digital ecosystem.
The new government will likely prioritize notification of rules to implement the digital personal data protection law, setting up of a data protection board, public consultation on the proposed Digital India Bill that will replace The Information Technology Act, 2000, and mapping out the AI Mission cleared by the previous cabinet in March that aims to turn India into an artificial intelligence hub with relevant infrastructure and workforce.
Policy Continuity
People aware of the ongoing discussions said that while portfolio allocation had yet to be done, the policy initiatives and legislative changes that had begun under the previous regime would continue.
“The important policies regarding the AI Mission, data protection and Digital India Act are the ones that will likely be among the priority list for the successors. Even if the portfolio goes to a coalition party, the agenda is unlikely to change,” one of the people said, asking not to be named.
The Bharatiya Janata Pary fell short of a majority in the Lok Sabha elections, winning just 240 seats as against 272 needed to form a government on its own, needing the support of key allies N. Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam Party and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United).
A senior government official said that despite the coalition parties seeking key ministerial portfolios, the work done by the previous government will only be taken forward, albeit with a lot more consultation with allies. “The direction of the decision-making would continue to be the same, but the process of decision-making may become slower, as it will be a lot more inclusive,” the official said, requesting anonymity.
Key Points
The Digital India Bill will be another key priority for the government, which wants Big Tech to tackle issues such as deepfakes and malicious AI-generated content. The industry, on its part, will want the government to preserve the safe-harbour principle to ensure that intermediaries are not held liable for third-party content posted on their platforms.
“It would be crucial to notify the digital personal data protection rules and establish the data protection bvoard for effective enforcement and implementation of the Act (Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023). The rules necessitate deliberation among the stakeholders to ensure a data protection regime that strikes a balance between state interest, business development, and consumer protection,” said Kazim Rizvi, founding director at tech policy think tank The Dialogue.
The ₹10,372-crore India AI Mission will focus on developing a manufacturing base of graphic processing units (GPUs) in public-private partnership, multi-modal domain-specific large language models (LLMs), and a unified data platform that will offer an open-source database of non-personal data that can be used to train AI models and market AI applications commercially. This, industry insiders said, would be a crucial element of policy-making and execution as India would be among the few developing nations that have zeroed in on alleviating safety concerns around AI, removing deepfakes and reducing misrepresentation.
The India AI Mission already has seven working committees that have suggested the need to create a public-private partnership model, which would be used to develop indigenous compute capacity—an offering that academia and researchers had long clamoured for. While there has been a strong discussion on regulating AI, the new government would want to take a more consultative approach, the government official quoted earlier said.
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Published: 10 Jun 2024, 04:03 PM IST
