Institute of Engineers & Technology (IET) India with the British High Commission’s UK India Tech Partnership to led a joint study on AI skilling landscape in India. The study uncovered key pressing challenges around AI skilling including curriculum, content, access, availability as well as perceived end results of gaining AI skills.

To understand the entire gamut of AI skilling space further, IET brought together global experts for a virtual round table on Friday, July 3rd 2020 to dive into the depths of ‘AI Skilling in India: Opportunities, challenges and road ahead’. The session was inaugurated by Jeremy Pilmore, British Deputy High Commissioner, British High Commission, Bangalore, India.  Sameer Dhanrajani, CEO & Co-founder, AIQRATE was part of the virtual round table which discussed about bridging AI skills gap in India.

What constitutes ‘fair use’ of data is increasingly coming under scrutiny by regulators across the world. With the digital detonation that has been unleashed in the past few years, leading to a deluge of data – organisations globally have jumped at the prospect of achieving competitive advantage through more refined data mining methods. In the race for mining every bit of data possible and using it to inform and improve algorithmic models, we have lost sight of what data we should be collecting and processing. There also seems to be a deficit of attention to what constitutes a breach and how offending parties should be identified and prosecuted for unfair use.

There’s growing rhetoric that all these questions be astutely addressed through a regulation of some form. With examples of detrimental use of data surfacing regularly, businesses, individuals and society at large are demanding an answer for exactly what data can be collected – and how it should be aggregated, stored, managed and processed.
If data is indeed the new oil, we need to have a strong understanding of what constitutes the fair use of this invaluable resource. This article attempts to highlight India’s stance on triggering regulatory measures to govern the use of data.Importance of Data Governance

Importance of Data Governance

Before we try to get into what data governance should mean in the Indian context, let us first look at the definition of data governance and why it is an important field of study to wrap our head around.

In simple terms, data governance is the framework that lays down the strategy of how data is used and managed within an organisation. Data governance leaders must stay abreast of the legal and regulatory frameworks specific to the geographies that they operate in and ensure that their organisations are compliant with the rules and regulations. A lot of their effort at present is aimed at maintaining the sanctity of organisational data and ensuring that it does not fall in the wrong hands. As such, the amount of time and effort expended on ensuring that these norms are adequately adhered to is contingent upon the risk associated with a potential breach or loss of data.

In effect, a framework of data governance is intended to ensure that a certain set of rules is applied and enforced to ensure that data is used in the right perspective within an organisation.

Data Governance in Indian Context

India is rapidly moving towards digitisation. Internet connectivity has exploded in the last few years, leading to rapid adoption of internet-enabled applications — social media, online shopping, digital wallets etc. The result of this increasing connectivity and adoption is a fast-growing digital footprint of Indian citizens. Add to this the Aadhaar programme proliferation and adoption – and we have almost every citizen that has personal digital footprint somewhere – codified in the form of data.

With a footprint of this magnitude, there is an element of risk attached. What if this data falls in the wrong hands? What if personal data is used to manipulate citizens? What are the protection mechanisms citizens have against potential overreach by stewards of the data themselves? It is time we found answers to these very pertinent questions – and data governance regulation is the way we will find comprehensive answers to these impending conversations

Perspectives for India

The pertinent departments are mulling over on a collective stand that should be taken while formulating data governance norms. For one, Indian citizens are protected by a recent Supreme Court ruling that privacy is a fundamental right. This has led to a heightened sense of urgency around arriving at a legislative framework for addressing genuine concerns around data protection and privacy, as well as cybersecurity.

As a result of these concerns, the Central government recently set up a committee of experts, led by Justice BN Srikrishna, tasked with formulating data governance norms. This committee is expected to maintain the delicate balance between protecting the privacy of citizens and fostering the growth of the digital economy simultaneously. Their initial work – legal deliberations and benchmarking activity against similar legal frameworks such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) – has resulted in the identification of seven key principles around which any data protection framework needs to be built. Three of the most crucial pointers include:

1. Informed Consent: Consent is deemed to be an expression of human autonomy. While collecting personal data, it is critical that the users be informed adequately about the implications around how this data is intended to be used before capturing their express consent to provide this data
2. Data Minimisation: Data should not be collected indiscriminately. Data collected should be minimal and necessary for purposes for which the data is sought and other compatible purposes beneficial for the data subject.
3. Structured Enforcement: Enforcement of the data protection framework must be by a high-powered statutory authority with sufficient capacity. Without statutory authority, any remedial measures sought by citizens over data privacy infringement will be meaningless.
Striking the right balance between fostering an environment in which the digital economy can grow to its full potential, whilst protecting the rights of citizens is extremely difficult.

With a multitude of malafide parties today seeking to leverage personal data of citizens for malicious purposes, it is crucial that the government and the legal system set out a framework that protects the sovereignty and interests of the people. By allaying fears of misuse of data, the digital economy will grow as people become less fearful and more enthusiastically contribute information where a meaningful end outcome can be achieved.

For all its growth and development since independence, India faces many systemic problems. From our complex and labyrinthine legal system to the inefficiencies in our agricultural sector, large-scale problems still abound.

We need to better connect our burgeoning population with basic facilities. While Artificial Intelligence may not be the panacea in itself, we need to harness its potential to improve living conditions. Thankfully, we have the intellectual capital – our information technology peers – that can bring substantial dividend in this arena. By combining our inherent technological prowess and the keenness of our government in promoting technology-led interventions, AI can truly be a game-changer for India. Here’s an India-specific perspective on how AI can be a force for good for our country.

Agriculture Sector
Though the agricultural sector sees piecemeal improvements, numerous problems go unresolved – from low yield, low predictability of yield, poor access to institutional credit and financing to lack of transparency around pricing for produce. Using AI, agriculture can be transformed by:

• Provision of on-demand information on quality of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and the track record of providers and opportunities for mechanisation through better equipment. This can be done through bot-enabled ‘Kisan Helplines’ that can provide guided advice for improving productivity

• Improving predictability of yield by ingesting data on soil health, equipment quality, farmer activity and weather conditions

• Improving visibility of market price trends for crops produced (domestic and international) so that they can make informed decisions on pricing, while exploring going to market without intermediary interference

• Leveraging data from productivity, yield and forecasts and potential prices to assess creditworthiness of individual farmers. This will speed up disbursement of finance and ensure farmers get better rates for crop insurance

Smart Cities
Indian cities have grown in an extremely unplanned manner, with public infrastructure and services struggling to catch up. Consider this – the cost of traffic congestion alone in just four major cities is estimated to be $22 billion annually. With AI, urban planners can:

• Track movement of traffic and people to identify opportunities for ‘decentralising’ major hubs and develop future-ready public infrastructure to facilitate smoother movement of people, vehicles and goods

• Model population density and availability of sanitation facilities to improve access. Additionally, by applying image analytics on drone surveilled images can help determine quality of sanitation facilities and accelerating their upkeep

• Identify and improve access to current and emergent residential and commercial hubs by creating more optimal public transport networks

• Align consumption of resources – energy, water, cooking gas – to actual needs

• Crowdsource, store and take action to improve infrastructure by directly soliciting participation from citizens
• Improve planning and forecasting for infrastructure development through better coordination between public works departments, leveraging traffic data and streamlining supply chains

Education System
The education system in India is among the most outdated and unequitable when compared with the developed world. Problems abound from a prominent level of student dropouts, to quality and methodology of teaching, lack of workforce readiness among students and outdated curricula. Here’s how AI can help improve certain facets:

• Track the demand for skills in the market and the educational infrastructure available to supply those skills through a National Skills Repository. This will help keep education concurrent with current market demands

• Automate routine, time-consuming tasks – from creating and grading test papers, developing personalised benchmarks for each student, identifying gaps in student development, tracking aptitude and attentiveness within each subject – and enabling teachers to focus on curriculum development, coaching and mentoring and improving behavioural and personality aspects of students

• Identify potential dropouts and root-causes, enabling educational institutions to take proactive steps to ensure student retention and course completion

Healthcare
The doctor-to-patient ratio in India is quite poor – with 0.62 doctors available per 1,000 people (WHO recommends a ratio of 1:1,000). When you add to that the inadequate spread of doctors across the country, we have a poorly served population, ranking 125th in the world for life expectancy. Using AI, we can:

• Identify areas with a high population density, which are underserved by public hospitals. Further, improve the deployment and availability of doctors, medical equipment and medication to better serve the population
• Track patient histories and clinical notes to prescribe evidence-based treatment

• Speed up routine processes such as scanning X-rays and CT-scans for malignancies using image analytics

• Improve public health studies by identifying early warning signals through alternative methods such as social media tracking

• Identify individuals without health insurance and incentivise their usage to improve patient medical adherence

Legal Challenges
When adjusted for VIP protection, India claims an extremely poor police-to-people ratio with 1 police for every 663 people. There are 27 million cases pending with courts, of which six million have been pending for over five years. AI can be a crucial enabler for our crumbling governance system and can help:

• Speed up review and summary writing of long drawn cases and their
history using natural language processing and voice recognition

• Use image analytics for surveillance and identification of wrong-doers in areas recognised for high criminal activity

• Surface fraudulent deals – especially among land deals – using anomaly detection frameworks to speed up delivery of justice

• Improve public services and transparency by routing RTI requests through intelligent bots, thus making it more efficient to get critical information

With a population of over 1.3 billion people, distributed across a huge landmass, public services urgently need technology-centric solutions that are both intelligent and scalable. AI will effectively address a number of these problems. To this end, it is critical that public services act sooner than later and ramp up their data sets, identify technology partners for ideation and apply AI techniques to power the India’s next leap forward.