India's newly launched AI Portal aims to address skill gap at government school level

The Union Minister for Electronics and IT, Law and Justice and Communications Ravi Shankar Prasad, on May 30th, launched India’s national Artificial Intelligence Portal called www.ai.gov.in.

This was unveiled on the occasion of the first anniversary of the second tenure of the PM Narendra Modi-led government.

The portal has been jointly developed by the Ministry of Electronics and IT and IT Industry. National e-Governance Division of Ministry of Electronics and IT and NASSCOM from the IT industry will jointly run this portal.

According to the press statement released at the time of the launch, this portal will serve as a one-stop digital platform for AI-related developments in India, sharing of resources such as articles, startups, investment funds in AI, resources, companies and educational institutions related to AI in India.

The portal also intends to share documents, case studies, research reports etc. It has a section about learning and new job roles related to AI.

While introducing the portal to the public, Minister Prasad said that the aim of the AI program is to give the young students of India a platform to empower them with appropriate new age tech mindset, relevant AI skill-sets and access to required AI tool-sets to make them digitally ready for the future.

The Program has been created and launched by the National e-Governance Division, Ministry of Electronics & IT in collaboration with Intel India, with support from Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSE&L), Ministry of Human Resource Development. DoSE&L will help reach-out to State Education Departments to nominate teachers as per eligibility criteria.

The Minister assured that “Responsible AI for Youth” will empower the youth to become AI-ready and help reduce the skill gap while enabling youth to create meaningful social impact solutions. The program is designed to reach out to students from Government schools pan India and provide them with an opportunity to become part of the skilled workforce in an inclusive manner.

Minister Prasad believes that India must be a leading country in the development of Artificial Intelligence in the world, leveraging upon its vast Internet-savvy population and data it is creating. "India’s AI approach should be of inclusion and empowerment of human beings by supplementing growth and development rather than making human beings less relevant," said Prasad.

MoS for E&IT, Communications, and HRD, Sanjay Dhotre, while emphasizing the role of digital technologies with special reference to the pandemic-afflicted world, said that such technologies have proved to be our saviors during the difficult times.

These have been of very crucial help especially in the field of education, agriculture, healthcare, e-commerce, finance, telecommunications, etc. He further added that digital technologies have been great equalizers despite several odds. Highlighting the importance of the AI Portal, Dhotre said that such a national portal will lead to the democratization of artificial intelligence in the country.

Responsible AI for Youth Programme, details:

The National Program is open to students of classes 8 - 12 from Central and State government-run schools (including KVS, NVS, JNV) from across the country - all 28 States and 8 Union Territories and aims to bring about a change in the thought process and create a bridge for the digital divide.

The Program will be implemented in a phase-wise manner and in its first phase, each of the State Education Department will nominate 10 teachers as per the eligibility criteria. Teachers may also self nominate themselves by fulfilling the eligibility criteria.

These teachers will be provided orientation sessions aimed to help them understand the premise and identify 25-50 potential students for the Program. The identified students will attend online training sessions on AI and understand how to identify social impact ideas/projects that may be created using AI and submit their ideas through a 60 seconds video explaining a proposed AI-enabled solution.

From the submitted ideas in the form of videos, the top 100 ideas will be shortlisted and these students will be invited to attend residential boot camps or online sessions (subject to COVID-19 situation); to take them through a deep dive AI journey. Post the boot-camps/ online sessions, these students will be asked to create real-time projects and submit their final project in a video format on the website.

Adequate handholding will be provided by Intel certified AI coaches and mentors throughout to ensure that ideas mature as prototypes. The experts will shortlist the top 50 project ideas and students will be invited to showcase their projects either face to face or in an online format. Further, top 20 innovative projects will be selected by an independent committee of experts and provided opportunities to showcase at relevant platforms.