Aiming for 20 to 25% tech share in India's GDP by 2025-26: IT Minister Chandrasekhar

The Indian government has set a goal of making technology 20-25 per cent of the nation’s GDP by 2025, India’s IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar has told Indian American entrepreneurs and asked them to be part of this India story.

Over the last nine years digital economy has expanded, diversified and currently there isn’t a slice or space in the tech sector that Indian entrepreneurs, Indian startups are not present in; whether it is semiconductors, micro-electronics, AI, the blockchain and web three high-performance computing languages and consumer internet, Chandrasekhar said in his virtual address to the annual conference of the Global Indian Technology Professionals Association.

Also read: India fast becoming big exporter of telecom technology: PM Modi

‘Innovation economy growing’

Any part of technology that you look at today, there is significant presence and momentum by Indian startups, Indian enterprises and Indian innovators. Over the last five years, in particular, during and after COVID-19, the Indian innovation economy has grown from the 4 to 5 per cent in 2014 to 10 per cent today, he said.

Describing AI as a kinetic enabler of the digital economy, the minister said it is a very important and valuable layer on the progress that has been made by the startups and innovation ecosystem over the last several years around the consumer internet and the data economy. The government has branded the artificial intelligence programmes and schemes in the country as India AI.

India AI in a broad nutshell consists of a partnership between the government on one hand, the large network of academic institutions on the other hand, startups and industry. This partnership today is building out the building blocks of AI for and for India AI and starting with a collection and curation of one of the most diverse and largest collections of data sets ever available to the research and startup community in India, which is the India Datasets programme, he said.

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Centres of excellence

The other part of the India AI programme is the fact that there are three centres of excellence that are going to be funded by the government of India. In this year’s budget, $150 million has been set aside to fund these three centres of excellence, which in turn will be hubs to a large collection of spokes around academic institutions, universities and colleges and industries that want to engage with these hubs.

According to the minister, overall India stack is gaining a tremendous amount of recognition from countries around the world, and multilateral agencies around the world. This played a significant role during the COVID pandemic in helping India fight the pandemic, detect disease, and deliver vaccines to the entire population in a seamless orderly manner. It has gained a lot of attention and interest, he said.

The other areas of focus for artificial intelligence certainly are healthcare and languages, he said. “A country as diverse as India with so many spoken languages dialects, it is extremely important that we grow the internet…We will expand the internet from 830 million Indians that use the internet to 1.2 billion by 2025 making India the largest connected nation on the global internet,” the minister said. The third and fourth element of AI is the data management office, and the creation of AI compute infrastructure, he said.

(With agency inputs)