Major opportunities for AI in jobs and governance, says MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan

We are less than a week away from the India Artificial Intelligence Impact Summit, which will witness the participation of representatives from dozens of countries. Can you give us a brief summary of where we are on AI from the Indian perspective?

We took an approach where we would try to provide three aspects of the infrastructure that AI needs: compute, datasets, and models. Access to them becomes a little easier with government support. Then our focus is to see what we can do with the applications and solutions that people can develop using these resources.

In the end, there are two things that are important. First, companies’ revenues will depend on how they use artificial intelligence. Distribution is important and that’s also what creates impact. There are many areas where you can use AI to increase productivity, efficiency and effectiveness in the Indian context. Our start-ups can do good things, and these are things we can offer as products to the rest of the world.

We have to do this somewhat sparingly, given the resources we have, which is one reason why this model we have adopted appeals to many countries in poor regions. [of the world]. We appear to be doing relatively well on a number of AI-related indicators measured by institutions such as Stanford University and others. We ranked third in the Viability Index for skills deployment and use of AI for enterprise solutions, and second overall.

So if you look at that kind of influence and that kind of skill, we clearly have some advantages that we need to build on. NITI Aayog did a study that showed that yes, undoubtedly we will lose or some jobs on the normal coding programming side of IT/ITeS (Information Technology Enabled Services) will disappear, but in terms of what else could happen, we can create a lot more jobs.

What I really see as the other big opportunity is that there are a lot of areas, including governance, where we would all like to see quality improve significantly, and that’s probably something that AI can deliver. At the same time, we are aware of the risks, the dangers, the possible harm, so I think we are ready to regulate when regulation is needed.

What does regulation look like in practice?

If you’ve seen the report led by the Chief Scientific Adviser on Artificial Intelligence Governance Guidelines, also try to use existing laws as much as possible. If you take, for example, what we can do with the current Information Technology Act, that is one aspect of it. The other part is what we need to do in the field of copyright. So this situation is handled in a certain way. Another part is how other data, including personal data, is used. So, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023 complies with this.

Part of this regulation is already in effect. Some of them require tweaking, tightening up, and that’s what we’re trying to do, including the new set of rules we’ve published. [amending the IT Rules, 2021 to require labelling of synthetically generated content].

These rules introduce tagging for AI-generated content and reduce takedown times for all content from 24-36 hours to two to three hours.

Labeling is for the right to know. We all have the right to know whether what we see is artificially produced. This is a very minor requirement and technologically quite easy to solve. There were some issues I thought about during the consultation [from October 2025 onwards, when the draft of these rules was published] Them [stakeholders] He raised the price with us and we addressed them. For example, we exempted automatic improvements in smartphone cameras. The same goes for special effects in movies.

The change in time limits is fundamentally based on our understanding that two factors are involved. Initially these times were much longer because the nature and type of intermediaries we were dealing with in those days were different and they had more time to respond.

The potential virality of most of these is very rapid. All damage occurs within 24 or 36 hours. Practically speaking, our own experience is that whenever this type of takedown is necessary, most companies do not need more than an hour or two to comply.

How prepared are we for an era in which supply chains in electronics manufacturing are weaponized?

Part of the story lies in the past, part in the future. We were producing electronics until the end of the 1990s. Many of them disappeared after the 1997 Information Technology-I agreement [which allowed IT hardware to be imported at minimum duties]. I’m not saying for a moment that this is necessarily bad.

I think the IT revolution might not have happened if you didn’t have as much access to computers, laptops, and other assorted gadgets as we do, thanks to the opening up. You have now reached a stage where I think it is important to have this capacity domestically. We are conscious that this is a global value chain, so it’s not like every part of it will be in India, but you need to have a reasonably significant part of it for the value chain to deepen.

So in a sense we start from the end of the finished product [such as smartphones] because that gives you scale and employment. The added value in the country is around 18-20 percent because companies mostly import parts. But this is changing with plans like the Electronic Component Manufacturing Plan, which encourages technology transfer similar to what China has learned from the Apple ecosystem. This plan is expected to significantly increase added value to 35-40%; This is equivalent to 40-50% of China’s. Semiconductors are more strategic and less concerned with value; It’s about what we can do. There is a Tamil saying: ‘Veralukketha veekam [Don’t bite off more than you can chew]’. So the question is: ‘How do you chew what you can bite and handle?’ The India Semiconductor Mission was designed based on what we can actually chew on. We are not ahead. But we are still in segments where there is significant consumption and will be there for the foreseeable future. The support needs to be extended for at least a decade, which is why India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 was also announced in the Union Budget. So we have to move forward and move organically and then kind of grow towards the front end.

There are reports that the timeline for compliance with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 has been reduced from 18 months to 12 months. From where?

We did not shorten it. We started consultation with the industry. We received feedback that the 18-month period is a bit long and that there are various elements that companies are ready to comply with. So can we actually talk to the industry and see if we can shorten this period? So this is a context in which we talk to the industry.

Varghese K. George: An international commentator likened the current situation regarding AI to our COVID-19 awareness in February 2020. So everyone was seeing a distant virus in China, and three weeks later everything in the world turned upside down. In other words, it is commented that that moment has already come in terms of artificial intelligence. So what is our understanding of where global AI research stands?

While much has been said about the agency AI takeover, our view is that its practical utility remains unclear. We believe that focusing on smaller, specialized AI tools such as industry-specific vision, quantitative models, and smaller language models provides faster, practical relevance and greater benefits to society and humanity. The perpetrator vision may appear, but it is still far away.

Jacob Koshy: How are IT firms discussing the AI ​​wave? Their business models are built on labor arbitrage, which is currently threatened by this technology.

We chatted with many people in the IT industry. They say most coding and programming jobs are difficult to maintain because they can be done by an AI bot. But when you need to build an application or solution, you need to have better domain expertise in areas like agriculture or manufacturing. Deploying the application requires human resources. You need to understand what datasets you need to bring in, how to tailor them to fit a particular situation, how to adjust the way orchestration levels work, and the multiple deployment-related tasks that need to be done. Their understanding is that they will still have multiple job opportunities. But this will require many of their current employees to be retrained and understand this differently. First of all, we have a program called Future Skills Prime, which is designed to reskill and retrain people. In universities, there is an emphasis on teaching this as a horizontal technology; We need to teach this in every lesson.

Suhasini Haydar: Two questions: Do we want to create an international body for AI ethics and safety? And on MeitY’s cyber law section: It aims to stop illegal speech, yet again and again we see people in government posting AI videos encouraging violence. Where do you think MeitY’s responsibility actually lies?

This is the first time a country in the Global South is hosting an artificial intelligence summit. So in a sense, yes, India could possibly be a natural leader in some aspects of AI; Not in terms of AI governance or regulation – that’s part of it – but rather in terms of offering more affordable technologies and more affordable deployments. I hope something comes out in the final declaration. Now, I really don’t know if there will be another international body like the Solar Alliance. We may not do this regularly; We are also part of the UN’s Global Digital Compact. So we will work with the international community to look at how this can move forward. The number of cases where the government blocks online information is actually a very small number; This is subject to social media organizations’ own community guidelines, etc. less than 0.1% of the total number of cases actually recorded within the scope of So it’s very small, but when something comes through this channel, we have to take action and we act according to whatever material is brought to us.

G. Sampath: Artificial intelligence is an energy-intensive sector with water and electricity needs. How do we look at this from our climate commitments?

India has one of the world’s largest grids with high levels of renewable energy and load capacity. One of the problems with renewable energy is that there is no consumption as soon as it is produced, as loads are insufficient and most of it is withdrawn. So there is an understanding that there may be excess power that can be used for this purpose. There are both air-cooled servers and water-cooled servers, and there are ways to save money.

But we are quite clear that there is nothing in terms of relief from environmental norms or any of the other norms for a data centre. The only set of norms that have been relaxed are construction norms; data centers too much parking etc. It does not require. This is a limited relief.

But in terms of water and electricity consumption, they will have to meet all relevant norms, subject to availability, what needs to be done. Most of these decisions are ultimately made at the State government level. There is not a very clear promotion of data centers in all locations.