Budget 2023 | National Data Governance Policy, centres of excellence for AI announced

During her speech at the Union Budget session 2023-24 on Wednesday, Union Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced the National Data Governance Policy "to unleash innovation and research by start-ups and academia".

The policy will be brought out to give access to anonymised data.

"One-stop solution of reconciliation and updating of identity and addresses to be established using Digilocker service and Aadhaar as foundational identity," she said.

DigiLocker, a cloud-based platform for storage, sharing and verification of documents and certificates, will now support more documents and will also be used for storing and sharing documents whenever needed, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said during her Budget speech at Parliament on Wednesday.

Digilocker, an initiative of Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) under the Digital India programme, is essentially a digital document wallet that currently supports government identity documents, marksheets and more.

Sitaraman also announced that three centres of excellence for Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be set-up in top educational institutions "For realising the vision of 'Make AI in India and Make AI work for India'. "

The government has already embarked on this AI revolution with MeitY, NASSCOM, and DRDO having created the roadmap for AI in the country.

The Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) has already been established for AI-related research and development.

The use cases of AI currently include biometric identification, facial recognition, criminal investigation, crowd and traffic management, agriculture, healthcare, education and more.

A task force on AI was constituted on August 24, 2017.

In the 2018 Union Budget, the government had said it will establish CoEs for research, training and skilling in Robotics, AI, digital manufacturing, Big Data Analytics, quantum communication and IoT.