NITI Aayog to use Artificial Intelligence to boost farmers' income

National Institution of Transforming India, that replaced the Planning Commission of India is planning on employing Artificial Intelligence in healthcare, Agriculture, education and Transportation as it has revealed in its discussion paper National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, released on Monday.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley incorporated the NITI Aayog with the task of starting a national program with the objective of facilitating research in artificial intelligence related areas in the Union Budget 2018 in February.

The Aayog said that the National strategy for Artificial Intelligence was aimed at leveraging AI for national economic growth, social development, and inclusive growth, and also to make the country a model for emerging and developing economies.

The National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence has also identified five obstacles in achieving AI for all and these are:

Lack of broad-based expertise in research and application.The absence of enabling data ecosystems — access to intelligent data. High resource cost and low awareness for adoption. Privacy and security issues, including lack of formal regulations around anonymisation of data. The absence of a collaborative approach to adoption and application of AI.

The NITI Aayog believes that the application of Artificial Intelligence techniques can improve healthcare systems, affordability and whereas its use in Agriculture can enhance farmer's income, their productivity and it can also be used to minimize wastage

NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant has said that application of AI to different sectors could help increase India’s year-on-year (YoY) growth rate by up to 1.3% and that the government was already working with organisations such as Microsoft and IBM in that direction.

India initially plans to finance its AI programmes from the $29.7 Mn (INR 200 Cr) allocated under the Atal Innovation Mission.

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