E-governance services can be improved through artificial intelligence: Prasad

New Delhi: Artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning can prove to be very helpful in detecting duplication under various e-governance services which will help the government save a lot of money, minister of electronics and information technology Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Thursday while inaugurating the Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence set up by the National Informatics Centre (NIC).

This centre will work closely with various ministries and government departments to promote innovation in application of AI to take e-governance services to the next level, he said.

The prime minister has been repeatedly conveying to us that all the ministers and the government must use new dimensions of AI in the course of governance, Prasad added.

Over the last two years, the government has been actively promoting the use of AI. Last year, the IT ministry had set up four committees to encourage research related to AI headed by directors of Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), Nasscom and eminent researchers to develop citizen-centric use cases.

Prasad also inaugurated the Command and Control Centre set up by NIC at its headquarters in New Delhi. It provides a single window solution for monitoring, troubleshooting and technical support for Cloud and Data Centre Infrastructure.

This newly established centre will focus on the areas of machine learning, image recognition, speech recognition and synthesis, deep learning and chatbot/voicebots, added Prasad.

NIC has been offering Data Centre and Cloud services to the government. Currently, it has four national data centres and 30 mini data centres across the country. Cloud services are presently offered from all four national data centres as well as some mini data centres. Over 1,000 e-governance applications of the government including Digital India Initiatives are hosted at these locations.

Digital India campaign was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July 2015 to ensure that government services are made available to citizens electronically through improved online infrastructure and by increasing Internet connectivity or by making the country digitally empowered in the field of technology.