The last 10 years have seen a major transformation in India. The Indian economy has become the fifth largest in the world. Alongside, the size of the government budget has tripled. Many other milestones have been surpassed, but there’s one factor that has transformed India — the quality of governance. Using technology and formulating a vision of digital public infrastructure (DPI), Prime Minister Narendra Modi has transformed governance from being leaky and dysfunctional to one where citizens are being directly served by the government. Through DPI, he has demonstrated how the power of technology can be harnessed as a powerful transformative force.
Fast forward to today. We are living in the age of AI. Most conversations about AI tend to get hyperbolic and giddy with excitement about the possibilities it represents. Much of this excitement is justified. There have many conversations — will AI transform computing, will LLMs be the next operating system, will tokens replace bits and bytes, can AI do language translation and can AI accelerate medicine discovery etc.
AI is many things. At its core, the promise is that it has the power to deliver more with less. It is an enabler of the coming wave of innovation. It could lead to machines and platforms with human-like intelligence if we achieve the holy grail of AGI (artificial general intelligence) and accelerate progress in several use cases from healthcare to security.
I believe that the biggest use case for AI is something that will impact every citizen – governance. So the killer app for AI can and will be governance, which I call GovAI.
There are three trends that are driving this.
First, the pace of digitalisation is rapidly accelerating. Currently 90-crore Indians are connected to the Internet and by 2026 that figure will touch 120 crore, making India the largest connected and digitalised country in the world.
Fintechs and many of over 1,00,000 startups that have grown in the last few years have been boosted by the government’s digital moves. GovAI can and will catalyse the IndiaAI ecosystem, creating a huge ecosystem of startups and innovators building AI models, products and platforms. The impact of the government’s digitalisation initiatives and its moves therein (with AI) will be significant. The scale and size of this opportunity is unique to India and must be fully exploited.
Second, as more and more Indians connect to and use the internet and the digital ecosystem, each is consuming and generating huge volumes of data. This is also making India one of the largest data repositories in the world. DPIs and digitalisation have made governments big repositories of personal and non-personal data. Data in turn is the fuel that trains AI models and determines the quality and capabilities of these models. Governments can and must create models around their datasets. There is an exciting architecture for GovAI that is possible with multiple small language models interacting with LLMs that create a very unique AI ecosystem to build, deploy and deliver. The IndiaAI programme has already envisaged a government dataset-led IndiaDatasets Programme that will be the feedstock of government AI models and also has safeguards against misuse of personal data with the data protection legislation in place.
Third, in the post Covid world, governments around the world are looking for ways to do more with their resources. There is a race to become efficient. Becoming efficient is becoming a political goal for many governments including in the US where Elon Musk is being asked by President-elect Donald Trump to focus on it.
The first phase of digital government addressed the dysfunctionalities and transformed India. With the intersection of DPI and AI, the government can become more efficient and ensure that the same resources can be used to make an impact across a broader spectrum of society. For an economy like India, with spending of over Rs 48 lakh crore this year and growing rapidly every year, AI can help be a kinetic enabler in extending the impact of this public spending and investment. AI and DPI can help re-imagine governance and hasten the attainment of PM Modi’s goal of maximum governance.
This killer app (applets or SLMs) to reimagine governance could include but are not limited to the following: Government revenues and finances; policy and scheme (including social security schemes) design and performance; public sector contracting; healthcare prediction and medicine discovery; economic and livelihood intensive segments like agriculture, fisheries, animal husbandry; national disaster and climate prediction; language translation; and national security, cybersecurity, law and order.
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The power of AI in reimagining governance cannot be overstated. I prefer describing AI as a kinetic enabler for the next wave of reimagining our governance. GovAI will make governance sharper, more targeted and make the vision of maximum governance a reality. So it is very clear that even as the world argues and debates the various applications of AI, India has the opportunity to demonstrate this exciting application of AI in governance, just as it has with IndiaDPI. This will require a deep, enduring, trusted and structural partnership between government and entrepreneurs and startups in the innovation ecosystem that is aimed at the full spectrum of building these models, IP and platforms/apps around governance.
India is the current Chair of GPAI (Global Partnership of AI) and has led the move to ensure trusted partnerships play a lead role in shaping the future of Tech and AI. The country’s success in using GovAI in reimagining governance will ensure that AI is not the preserve of a few companies or countries, but is more inclusive and accessible by all countries.
The last 10 years have been transformational and have placed India at the pole position of the global narrative on tech in governance, inspiring many countries to learn and follow suit. Making governance the killer app for AI will extend the arc further, truly reimagining governance in the age of AI.
Welcome to the age of GovAI.
The writer is a former Union minister
