India’s AI Moment – Current Trajectory of AI and Quantum Computing Research in India

India, one of the youngest countries in the world, has always been abundant in talent and driven by ambitions, particularly in the domain of science and technology. Scientific temper is a part of the country’s DNA, and our people are open to embracing new technologies. Despite that, for decades, India could not leverage its true potential at a scale that was expected!

But things have gradually started to move in the right direction. The success of Digital Public Infrastructure and Digital Governance initiatives of the government even in the country's remotest corners, is a live testimony to that fact!

So, what has changed in the last few years? How are things looking more positive and encouraging than ever before? And where the current trajectory is going? These are some of the few questions in everyone's mind.

Let’s explore some recent developments.

National Quantum Mission (NQM)

Back in 2021, India’s first-ever Quantum Computer Simulator (QSim) Toolkit was launched. QSim is one of the key initiatives of the Indian government to promote quantum computing research in India and it’s a product of collaborative research and development by multidisciplinary groups of academicians, scientists, engineers and industry including – IISc, IIT-Roorkee and C-DAC.

On 19th April 2023, Union Cabinet approved the National Quantum Mission (NQM) with a total cost of Rs.6003.65 crore (approximately $740 million from 2023-24 to 2030-31) to seed/nurture and scale up scientific and industrial R&D in the domain of Quantum Technologies. NQM Mission’s objective includes: setting up of 4 Thematic Hubs (T-hubs) in top academic and R&D institutions of the country, in the domains of Quantum Computing, Quantum Communication, Quantum Sensing & Metrology and Quantum Materials & Devices. Sectors like communication, finance, energy, drug discovery/design, space, banking, healthcare, security etc. are going to benefit from the R&D in this domain, and this mission complements other crucial initiatives of the country.

India AI Mission

This year, the Union cabinet approved the India AI mission with a budget outlay of Rs 10,372 crore (approximately $1.2 billion) for R&D for the next five years. According to the official press release, some of the key components of India AI mission are - India AI Compute Capacity, India AI Innovation Centre (IAIC), India AI Datasets Platform, India AI Application Development Initiative, India AI Future Skills, India AI Startup Financing, and Safe & Trusted AI. The mission envisions developing a cutting-edge, scalable AI computing infrastructure in the country by deploying over 10,000 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) through strategic public-private collaborations.

Both missions are timely and perfectly aligned with the mood of the country! Such initiatives, combined with regulatory reforms, transparency and a push for public-private partnership, have opened up windows of opportunities for leading AI and Quantum Computing players like NVIDIA, and they are ready to participate in building an innovation and R&D ecosystem in the world’s largest AI talent pool.

Current Trajectory – A Snapshot

India is among the top countries in the world in the field of scientific research and ranks third among the most attractive investment destinations in Technology. As per the Commerce and Industry Ministry, the Indian patent office has granted the “highest” number of 41,010 patents till November 15th, 2023.

Some Stats:

According to “India AI 2023”, the first edition of the Expert Group report, published by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, AI is expected to add USD 967 billion to the Indian economy by 2035 and USD 450–500 billion to India’s GDP by 2025, accounting for 10% of the country’s USD 5 trillion GDP target.

India AI is one of the key initiatives of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s ‘National Program on AI,’ which emphasizes promoting a culture of R&D and Skill Development, in alignment with the larger vision of Responsible AI.

The long-term objective of the India AI program is to make AI infrastructure more accessible for local stakeholders, be it public sector, private sector, independent researchers, startups or anyone interested in this space.

The focus is on brainstorming ways to provide AI compute as a service via the public and private sectors and that involves institutional development of indigenous compute capacity (for the public sector) with the help of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) kind of institutions and public-private partnerships.

It is important to note that there was a 1.5x growth in generative AI startups between 2021 and 2023, and as of May 2023, some 60 generative AI startups were active in India. According to some reports, India’s tech startups ecosystem is achieving new milestones, in the last five years, their cumulative funding has exceeded over $70 billion, while the share of tech startups in tier-2 and tier-3 cities rose to 40% in 2023.

In between all the flashy headlines, there are some fascinating yet silent initiatives as well, that are gradually taking shape, i.e. Bhashini and AIRAWAT, to name a few.

Launched during the Digital India Week 2022, Bhashini is India’s first AI-led language translation program, which aims to enable “massive citizen engagement to build multilingual datasets through a crowd-sourcing initiative called Bhasha Daan (an initiative to crowdsource language inputs for multiple Indian languages).” The goal is to increase the Indian Language content on the internet, in the domains of public interest, which in simple words means encouraging common people to use the internet in their local language. How will it help? It will help in building large datasets for Indian languages, which can be used to train AI models for use by different stakeholders, to provide better governance and services.

Similarly, in the domain of High-Performance Computing (HPC), India is now making new records! C-DAC’s AI Research Analytics and Knowledge Dissemination Platform (AIRAWAT) placed India in the list of top 100 supercomputing systems in the world (AIRAWAT ranked 75 in the 61st edition of the top 500 Global Supercomputing list), earlier their HPC AI supercomputer PARAM SIDDHI AI system, was ranked 62 in the 56th edition of the Top500 list. The press release says that “the system will act as a common computational cloud platform for Big Data Analytics and Assimilation with a large, power-optimized AI cloud infrastructure connecting all Centres for Research Excellence in Artificial Intelligence (COREs), Indian Centres for Transformational AI (ICTAIs), and other Academic, Research Labs, Scientific Community, Industry, and the Start-Ups institutions with the National Knowledge Network.”

With all these initiatives, India, a founding member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), is not just investing in an AI future but presenting a template for the ‘Responsible use of AI’ for other aspirational economies of the Global South too!

Status of Higher Education and Research

The FIST (Fund for Improvement of Science and Technology Infrastructure in Universities and Higher Educational Institutions) scheme of the DST (Department of Science & Technology) is going to play a crucial role too. Recently, the fund has been restructured to facilitate the development of R&D infrastructure for not only academic organizations but start-ups, manufacturing companies, and MSMEs, as well.

Building high-performance computing infrastructure and massive GPU clusters is a top priority of the Indian government. Since 2021, four new Supercomputers have already been installed one each at IIT-Hyderabad, NABI-Mohali, CDAC-Bengaluru, and IIT Kanpur.

But developing infra capabilities alone is only half the work, so recognising the need to support the development of a skilled AI workforce in India, the government’s Expert Working Group recommendations include an AI research-based model curriculum across secondary, post-secondary, and higher education. This includes research fellowships, faculty training for AI, and career path mapping to develop a professional AI community.

In 2019, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) announced AI as an optional subject and partnered with industry providers and private sector players for its smooth implementation and delivery. India’s National Education Policy (NEP) encourages and mandates the introduction of advanced tech topics like AI in the curriculum. All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) have started offering AI as an elective in BTech programmes and some have also started BTech programmes on AI and Data Science.

From the YuvaAI initiative to FutureSkills PRIME to AI4Bharat to National Curriculum Development to Research Support, all initiatives are geared towards one thing - skilling the youth of India and preparing them to build solutions for the Future.

These developments are going at a remarkable pace! At the same time, some major technology players, their participation in India’s growth story, and their alignment with India’s key initiatives like Digital India, Make in India, skill India and Startup India, have accelerated things to the next level.

NVIDIA in India – A Partnership to Accelerate AI Capabilities

NVIDIA is shaping the future of technology and in some sense, we can say bringing the future to life. Their leadership vision is holistic, progressive and aligned with the regional realities (in almost every geography where they operate). NVIDIA is one of those few tech players who put the spotlight on the better side of AI and try to bring a sense of hope, optimism and positivity amid a highly hyped environment.

NVIDIA’s partnership with India is going well and it seems that they are perfectly aligned with both- the needs as well as the aspirations of New India.

Be it India’s plan for enhancing its compute capacity, opening up AI innovation and technology centres, building local datasets, developing AI-based applications in critical sectors for the problem statements sourced from Central Ministries, State Departments, and other institutions, plans to promote skilling in AI and building data/AI labs in tier2-tier3 cities, supporting and accelerating deep-tech AI startups and research, providing support (including access to required infrastructure) to local industries/MSMEs or implementing Responsible AI vision, NVIDIA has something to offer at each stage!

And recent developments suggest that the company is working at pace in that direction too! It is linking partnerships with Indian giants like Reliance Industries Limited and Tata Group, to work together to create an AI computing infrastructure and platforms for developing AI solutions (based on NVIDIA technology like the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and NVIDIA DGX Cloud). India’s Reliance and NVIDIA have also announced a collaboration to develop India’s own foundation large language model, trained on the country’s diverse languages.

NVIDIA in collaboration with IIT Hyderabad, has already set up India's first AI Technology Centre - NVAITC (NVIDIA AI Technology Centre) to accelerate research and innovation in this space. IIT Hyderabad houses NVIDIA DGX-1 and NVIDIA DGX-2 systems, dedicated to research projects related to agriculture, smart transportation, mobility, and more.

Apart from research, NVIDIA has an evolving base and reach among professionals in India too! It is home to four of its engineering development centres: Gurugram, Hyderabad, Pune and Bengaluru and there are now more than 3,800 NVIDIANs in India. According to its official stats, there are more than 320,000 India-based developers, associated with NVIDIA’s developer program. Their CUDA parallel programming platform is downloaded roughly 40,000 times a month in India, and as per their estimates, there are 60,000 experienced CUDA developers in the country.

India’s AI moment is bringing new surprises, with each passing day and it is expected that in the new term of the government, a lot of ongoing parallel initiatives will further accelerate to the next level!

India believes that AI is a tribute to human intelligence and “the teamwork of AI with humans can do wonders for our planet,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi