New Delhi: American tech giant Intel and the Ministry of Electronics and IT’s (MeitY) IndiaAI initiative have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to collaboratively build AI readiness and promote AI skilling across the country.
The partnership, announced on 2 May, aims to empower students, professionals, startups and government institutions under the ambit of the IndiaAI Mission.
The agreement outlines a multi-pronged strategy to enhance the AI ecosystem by supporting innovation, education, and public sector engagement.
It focuses on four key programmes, which are providing AI training to school and college students, offering mentorship and technology support to startups, conducting policy and implementation dialogues with public sector leaders, and expanding the deployment of AI-powered tools like Bhashini in remote classrooms using AI-enabled PCs.
Santhosh Viswanathan, Vice President and Managing Director (India region) at Intel, highlighted the partnership as a vital milestone in strengthening India’s AI capabilities. “By equipping students, startups, and public sector leaders with cutting-edge AI skills and frugal innovation tools, we aim to accelerate innovation, break down barriers and generate positive societal impact,” he said.
Echoing this vision, Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary at MeitY and CEO of the IndiaAI Mission, noted that the collaboration has already borne fruit through programmes like YuvaAI, which has trained thousands of students in foundational AI concepts. He added that the creation of a dedicated data lab in partnership with Intel will further support India’s youth in gaining practical experience in AI and data science.
Additionally, while commenting on this new partnership, Bhashini CEO Amitabh Nag, who has recently been assigned additional charge as Director of India Dataset Platform (AIkosh) & Application Development Initiative at IndiaAI stated: “Multi-lingual Classroom is what we are driving as a use case with BHASHINI – (Digital India BHASHINI Division) at the edge in offline and Online model. Intel would’ve to ensure that speaker identification, automatic language detection, diarization, automatic speech recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech translation … and all other tech are on edge to ensure that we provide education in the mother tongue.”
Here it should be noted that the IndiaAI Mission, which was approved by the Union Cabinet with a financial outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore, is a flagship initiative aimed at democratising access to AI resources, fostering industry partnerships and enabling inclusive growth in the digital economy.
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