India wishes to help friendly nations get benefits of its DPIs: Joint Secy Meity Sanket Bhondve

"We can help all our friendly nations. And as the government says, the global South. We are trying our best to get the edge in this and see how in this open source and scalable way we can help our friendly nation to get the benefits of these DPIs," the joint secretary told ANI on the sidelines of the Carnegie Global Technology Summit.

India has developed some world-class DPIs - UPI, Aadhaar, ONDC, and Digi Locker. Most of these DPIs are open, secure, and interoperable.

India has signed MoUs with several countries for cooperation in the field of sharing digital public infrastructure so far. Among others, a key emphasis of the Indian government has been on ensuring that the benefits of Indian DPIs are not limited to India only; other countries, too, benefit from it.

"So today we are on a silver lining. We have done a lot, but still, the sky is the limit," the joint secretary added.

"Now onwards, we are also trying to see that the remaining pockets, the deep pockets and the remote parts, those sectors that have not been covered, we need to touch them, we need to cover them, and we need to see that every digital maverick of India, every citizen gets the benefit of DPI or digital solutions."

On Saturday, S. Krishnan, Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), said that India wants to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a technology for itself and see such emerging technologies deployed worldwide, particularly in the Global South.

"India not just wants to use AI as something that it can do for itself but wants to sort of take a leadership position on behalf of the global south and seeing that it is deployed across the world," the Secretary said at the Carnegie Global Technology Summit here in the national capital.

India launched the IndiaAI Mission on March 7, 2024, to bolster India's global leadership in AI and democratize the benefits of AI across all strata of society

The secretary said that India has fundamentally been flexible in its approach towards AI.

"Right from the beginning, we decided not to be doctrine and not to be dogmatic and say 'safety is the biggest concern. We have to regulate," the secretary said.

He said India has always felt that AI is an opportunity.

"It depends on how well we use it, how we seize it, and we have to look at what the challenges are and address our challenges in making most of it," the secretary noted.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended the AI Summit in Paris. India was invited to co-chair the Paris summit, and next year, it will host an AI summit.

The themes of the previous summits have been around safety and action.

"Now we believe it is time to start talking about impact [of AI]," the secretary said.

He also spoke about latching AI with DPIs.

"DPI layer interacting with AI and enabling that to actually be used more widely, so that there's even more innovation, not just at the application level, but at the agent level, agentic level, in order to take it to the next stage of how it can be applied. And this is clearly something that we can share with the rest of the world where it is needed," he added.

Further, he stressed the need to increase the number of data centres here in India. He noted that India could be a lucrative destination for data centres.