The government’s premier think tank Niti Aayog and the ministry of electronics and IT (MeitY) are sparring over the creation of an artificial intelligence mission, people familiar with the development told ET.
In an inter-ministerial meeting held earlier this month, MeitY officials verbally raised concerns over the many “overlaps” between Niti Aayog’s Rs 7,000-crore AI road map, and its own work in the area, a government official said.
“MeitY has asked finance ministry to intervene and resolve some of the issues,” the official told ET.
A top Niti Aayog official, however, said the AI mission could not be the “monopoly” of a single ministry. “This is not a department issue. It cannot be a monopoly of one ministry. Instead, it should be a national movement and all departments should adopt machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) while ensuring there is no duplication of work,” the senior Niti Aayog official told ET.
“MeitY has been raising objections at various levels as they feel it is the ministry which should be doing AI,” another government official said.
The think tank, which rolled out the strategy a year ago, would go ahead as planned, the Niti Aayog official said.
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Niti Aayog’s road map includes setting up five centres of research excellence, 20 institutional centres for transformational AI and a cloud computing platform called AIRAWAT. The think tank, which has got approval from the finance ministry’s expenditure finance committee (EFC) for its proposal, will take it to the Union Cabinet, the Niti Aayog official added.
Source: Economic Times
