Dr. Neeta Verma, Director General, NIC highlighted the innovative use of Artificial Intelligence and some of its prominent applications in e-Gov solutions and services during a session on “AI for All – Partnerships for Making AI Accessible & driving Innovation” at the RAISE 2020 Virtual Summit on 08th October 2020.

The RAISE 2020 virtual summit is a Global Artificial Intelligence Summit organized by the Government of India in partnership with Industry & Academia. The virtual global summit was inaugurated by the Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi. The summit provided a platform for global meetings of minds to exchange ideas and charter a course to use AI for social empowerment, inclusion, and transformation in key areas like Healthcare, Agriculture, Education, and Smart Mobility amongst other sectors.

In her address, Dr. Verma emphasized upon the role of NIC in partnering with the Government at Central, State, and District level for delivery of eGov services. To further strengthen the partnership NIC has established Centre of Excellence (CoEs) in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Analytics, Blockchain, etc. These CoEs are primarily focussing on the aggregation of these services in the Government for better Governance or delivery of services.

The cloud infrastructure of NIC has also been upgraded to provide AI-ready infrastructure to the Government Departments. Such enablement is helping the user departments in easily building better AI enable models around the data that they already have.

Among the successfully implemented AI-related projects by NIC, she mentioned the Image analytics used for Swachh Bharat Mission. It helps applicants put the right type of photos with proper specification, geo-tagging, etc, and thus minimizing the chances of the application from being rejected.  This also helped in the timely disbursement of subsidy money to the beneficiaries. Life Certificate for Pensioner Verification for Meghalaya Government is another AI-driven application that proved to be a boon for senior citizens.  The Virtual Court solution provided by NIC supported disposing of thousands of cases during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The session was hosted by Dr. R Ramanan, Mission Director of the Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) and moderated by  Shri Balendu Sharma, Localization and Accessibility Lead, Microsoft India. Other eminent speakers during the session were Shri K R Sanjiv, CTO, Wipro Limited, Mr. Arvind Gupta, Former CEO MyGov, Mr. Rudramuni B,  Vice President and Indian R&D Head, Dell Technologies, and Co-Chairman CII Centre for Digital Transformation, Prof. M. Balakrishnan, Vice-Chancellor, Satya Bharti Institute of Technology and Professor, IIT Delhi.