Artificial Intelligence Policy in the State of Telangana

Abstract
This article provides a brief background on the views and approaches of the Telangana government on Artificial Intelligence. Official AI website, State Information Technology Ministery’s press release and online media articles regarding the AI initiatives are referred to in writing this paper. In conclusion, this paper shall provide a critical assessment of the Telangana government towards AI, and it would serve as an initial document for policy research.

Introduction

AI has become a buzzword in today’s politico-economic arena. NITI Aayog, India’s government think tank, released its discussion paper in 2016 triggering a wide range of academic and policy discussions. It has been four years, and nearly ten official documents related to AI policy have been released. It includes AI stack, special committee reports of Ministry of Electronics and Information technology (Meity), and a policy paper from NASSCOM. While policymakers are being gripped with the data protection laws, and the ex-ante policy research, the state of Telangana has declared the year 2020 as the year of AI. Active involvement in encouraging AI startups and augmentation of AI systems in the critical sectors of governance, healthcare, education, and agriculture are being given full consideration.

In the realm of emerging technologies, the Telangana government has identified eight technologies, including AI, blockchain, cloud, Internet of Things, and robotics, in its push for the use of technology. AI, being the new General Purpose \technology (GPT), policymaking and implementation are being given a priority. In January 2020, Minister K. T. Rama Rao has espoused that Telangana would encourage the sentiment of ‘government being the buyer.’ Such a stance enables the Indian and international AI firms to design their product following the needs of Telangana Public. Also, 8 MoU’s were signed by the government in the area of AI with the likes of Nvidia, Wadhwani group AI.

The development and research would be encouraged in and from the state’s capital, Hyderabad. It is the growing IT hub of India with approximately 1200 IT companies and over 4 lakh professionals. Given its climatic and geographic conditions, it would be a better suitable location for global AI investments. It rolled out its plan with an emphasis on the triple stakeholder formula consisting of government, AI industry and the academia.

Framework and focus areas:

Telangana mentions focus areas in its official AI website to be

Healthcare
Mobility
Governance
Agriculture
Law enforcement and Traffic

These areas are similar to that of what mentioned in the NITI Aayog’s discussion paper excluding education.

Strategy Framework:

The strategy framework has been extracted directly from the ai.telangana.gov.in, Telangana government’s official website for its policy on AI. This framework appears to be fancy, but a detailed policy paper on each focus area is missing till the date this paper is written. A quick working document should have been released within a year, as they publicly announced 2020 to be the year of AI.

Datasets and Data exchange program

Providing High Quality, Machine Readable Data through Seamless Data Sharing Platform for Better Data Infrastructure and AI implementations.

Talent and Education

Preparing AI talent pool by skilling the resources through certificate, graduate and under-graduate courses at premier education institutes.

Promoting Research and Innovation

Enabling AI Research and Innovation by supporting AI startups/companies in Government AI implementations.

High-Performance Computing Labs

Providing high-performance computing on an Operating Expenditure model to help build the AI ecosystem.

Governance, Ethics and Privacy

Responsible & non-discriminatory development of AI solutions to ensure social security of citizens, standards and regulations.

Enabling AI Adoption and Community

Intensive community collaboration – for bringing Artificial Intelligence technology and use cases to the masses.

AI Calendar

AI calendar of Telangana government can be accessed here –ai.telangana.gov.in.

AI Initiatives by Telangana Government

Name	Date	Sector	Uses
Microsoft AI classroom series		Education	Prepare 30,000 undergraduate students for AI It was created in partnership with the Telangana Academy for Skill and Knowledge (TASK) and Telangana State Council of Higher Education (TSCHE), to provide students with introductory courses in AI.
AI4AI or Artificial Intelligence 4 Agricultural Innovation in collaboration with the Center for Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) World Economic Forum.		Agriculture
Centre of Excellence for Gaming, VFX, Computer Vision & AI	February 2020	Design and Gaming	Encourage research and development in the field of computer vision.
MoU With Airbus For Sustainable Aviation Using Internet Of Things (IoT)	March 14, 2020	Aviation	Tri-partite MoU with Government of Telangana and Airbus for a POC (Proof of Concept) to explore IoT (Internet of Things) sensors based monitoring of environment at the airport.
An AI-based contact tracing system	DGP Telangana tweeted on May 8, 2020	Governance	1. Track those not wearing masks 2. Effective COVID containment
Academic alliance with Uipath		Education	1. Build Robotic Process Automation workforce 2. Train Students in the AI – Robotics
Telangana AI Mission	July 2, 2020	Policy	The first governing council has decided on key focus areas such as Agriculture and Healthcare, with members proposing collaborations on behalf of their respective organizations.
Artificial Intelligence for Agricultural Innovation	August 12, 2020	Agriculture	It was launched in association with Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, India (C4IR), and World Economic Forum
INAI, an applied artificial intelligence (AI) research centre in Hyderabad	October 2020	Health care	1. Government of Telangana, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) and Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) have collaboratively launched INAI. 2. The main objective is to create national assets such as curated datasets, computing infrastructure, tools and frameworks to attract global talent for high impact research towards social sector development.
Medicine From the Sky	July 2019	Health Care	1. Agreement with the World Economic Forum and Healtnet Global 2. Deliver medicines using drones
Drones for mapping Urban Properties	Expected to launch soon	Governance	1. Image mapping 2. Computer Vision 3. Digital records of the land and quick assessment
Chatbot for Telangana tourism website	January 2019	Governance	Remove human interaction with the website visitors.
Advanced Industrial AI Research and Development Centre	January 2019	Research	Foxconn Industrial Internet Company Limited (FII) to set up this centre.
The AI-powered chatbot of Road Transport Authority (RTA)	Reported on June 18, 2020	Governance	1. Agreed with a Startup. Details are not available. 2. Provides instant answers to all citizen’s queries regarding the RTA services
Smart RoboCop for the police department	December 2017	Security	1. Developed by H-Bots Robotics, a Hyderabad-based company, with the help of AI 2. Assist police department in managing law and order, and traffic management
Use of AI in eye care screening	November 2016	Health Care	The government adopted Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE) to address the issue which helped to make early interventions and prevent instances of refractive errors.

Conclusion:

When compared to the NITI Ayog discussion paper, the Telangana government’s official statements appear to be a talk without implementation. The initiatives taken by the State of Telangana affirms that the state is determined to pose itself as the leader in attracting AI into Hyderabad and deploying the technology into the governance structures.

Similar to the NITI Aayog paper’s shortcomings, the Telangana government has also missed out the importance of anticipatory governance research (detailed explanation on this can be found here). However, their framework for AI finds community awareness programs on AI use-cases. The mentioned anticipatory governance research is a part of anticipatory research. Such a framework is absent in the discussion paper of NITI Aayog or its recent AI Stack paper.

Establishment of data centres is the primary milestone for any state to become a leading power in AI development. Absence of data, both structured and unstructured becomes a major hindrance to AI development. Algorithms cannot be deployed without training them with massive data. Importance should be given to the establishment of centrally controlled data centres whose nodal points are governed by the states and union territories. NITI Aayog has identified this and NAIM was proposed. But on the practicality, it appears to be a Himalayan task. India still could not digitalize its land records completely, having annotated datasets becomes a dream. It is expected that something similar would be created at the state level.

Finally, the relationship between citizen and state is bound by a domestic social contract. People would give away some of their freedoms to the state to have a safe, secure environment. Such an agreement should not be disturbed with the advent of AI and its uncertainty. Challenges to fundamental rights such as privacy, equality, liberty are sure to raise and should be tackled during the stage of development of AI. The active debate should be encouraged on these issues (Marda, 2018) to bring a holistic picture.

Author:

Arun Teja Polcumpally is currently a doctoral fellow at Jindal School of International Studies. He is also a Research Assistant at Center for Security Studies (CSS). He formerly had a brief stint as an Editor at Jindal Center for Global South. He also holds the Research advisor post at Thedigitalfuture.in and ADSCV foundation

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