AI for Viksit Bharat: Opportunities, Enablers & Challenges

NITI Aayog’s 2025 report “AI for Viksit Bharat” highlights Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a critical driver of India’s inclusive economic growth.

AI Opportunities for India

AI Adoption Across Industries: AI can enhance productivity, reduce costs, and expand access to goods and services. Wider adoption across sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and logistics could bridge 30–35% of India’s productivity gap.
Transforming R&D through Generative AI: Generative AI can accelerate innovation, modernise traditional industries, and enable faster commercialisation of new products. This could help India strengthen global competitiveness by bridging 20–30% of the gap.
Innovation in Technology Services: Leveraging its IT strength, India can move towards higher-value AI solutions and new business models such as AI-as-a-Service. This would reinforce its position as a tech leader, contributing 15–20% to economic growth.

Potential Outcomes for AI-led Value Creation

GDP Boost: AI adoption could add $500-600 billion to India’s GDP annually by 2035, anchoring 8-9% long-term growth momentum.
Manufacturing: Automation and defect-detection may drive a 30% rise in manufacturing output, adding $90 billion in annual GDP.
Financial Inclusion: Alternate credit models powered by AI could onboard 150 million underserved borrowers, deepening India’s financial inclusion without collateral dependence.
Farm Resilience: AI-driven advisories and yield modelling may improve farm output by 20–25%, especially across drought-prone, rainfed agricultural zones.
Health Reach: In rural Community Health Centres (CHCs) with 80% speciality doctor vacancies, AI-assisted triage tools could halve diagnostic backlogs and reduce patient overloads.

Strategic Enablers for AI-led Growth

Compute Capacity: India will need public compute clusters with around 50,000 GPUs by 2027 to train large domestic AI models.
Model Sovereignty: Developing foundational models in Indian languages is vital for reducing foreign dependence and making AI accessible to a diverse population.
Data Access: AI adoption across sectors will require publicly available large labelled datasets and clear, enforceable rules for secure data sharing.
Workforce Readiness: By 2030, about 25 lakh skilled professionals will be crucial to design, deploy, and manage AI systems across fields.
Innovation Spread: Regional AI hubs with shared infrastructure can grow startup ecosystems and promote AI adoption outside metro areas.

Barriers to AI Deployment

Compute Bottleneck: Severe GPU shortages, high energy needs, & long delivery timelines hinder India’s ability to train large AI models domestically. India holds less than 2% of global computing power.
Data Fragmentation: Incomplete and siloed datasets weaken model accuracy, especially for Indian languages and regional contexts, slowing reliable AI deployment.
Talent Shortage: Low researcher density and persistent brain drain reduce cross-domain expertise, weakening India’s pipeline for indigenous AI innovation.
MSME Divide: Over 60 million MSMEs lack affordable tools and awareness, while large firms dominate adoption, widening the digital gap.
Regulatory Lag: Absence of sector-specific rules on privacy, cybersecurity, and consent creates uncertainty in sensitive domains like healthcare and finance.

Way Forward

Compute Investment: Accelerate the IndiaAI Mission to deploy 50,000 GPUs through a federated public-cloud infrastructure, ensuring affordable access for startups and researchers.
Data Governance: Operationalise the India Data Management Office (IDMO) to create sectoral data banks with standardised, anonymised, and ethically-sourced datasets.
AI Skilling: Integrate AI education from school to postgraduate levels and offer industry-linked certifications to create 2.5 million professionals by 2030.
Regulatory Sandboxes: Create sector-specific test-beds (e.g., fintech, healthtech) for safe AI innovation, enabling real-world validation before scale-up.
Innovation Hubs: Establish AI centres of excellence in Tier-2/3 cities to decentralise research, incubate startups, and link them with local universities.

Artificial Intelligence can transform India’s growth trajectory by bridging digital and social divides, enhancing productivity, and promoting inclusion. As NITI Aayog states, “AI is not just a technology, it is a catalyst for equitable and sustainable development.”

Reference: Times of India | PMFIAS: India’s Leadership in Global AI Governance

PMF IAS Pathfinder for Mains – Question 347

Approach

Introduction: Write a contextual introduction about “Artificial Intelligence for Viksit Bharat”.
Body: Analyse the role of Artificial Intelligence in promoting inclusive growth, challenges of bias and accessibility and way forward.
Conclusion: Emphasis on AI’s role for inclusive growth and mention future course of action.