Bridging Digital Divide: How Generative AI Could Be India’s Next Aadhar Or UPI

By Jaspreet Bindra & Sudhir Tiwari

The amazing success of the Indian Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) story is well known. Riding on India Stack, this digitisation at population scale has led to 1.4 billion Indians with a digital biometric identity with Aadhaar, simplified payments at scale, with UPI enabling almost half the world’s digital payments, the world’s largest vaccination campaign, and many other achievements. Innumerable startups have leveraged open APIs of the Stack to create innovative and at-scale services for Indian citizens.

The true power of the India Stack has been realised by offering it as a Digital Public Good, or DPG (much like clean air, defence or law enforcement) so that it reaches each citizen; making it open enables large companies and startups to build value and wealth on top of it. We believe that GenAI should be treated similarly. India could build its own Bharat LLM: Trained on the rich data that the India Stack generates, and fine-tuned for Indian languages and context to solve India-specific use cases and problems. Let’s call this JanAI – GenAI for the people.

JanAI could be a set of LLMs built as a layer of India Stack, where the focus would be on the offering as a public service. Thus, it will bridge the digital divide, and provide benefits for the entire population, much like Aadhar and UPI have done. This will also give India the opportunity to build guardrails and safeguards around privacy, bias, and other ethical AI concerns, using Indian notions of collective and societal privacy and trust which are sometimes quite different from the Western concept of individuality-oriented privacy.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is creating waves all over the world, enabling ChatGPT to race to 100 million subscribers in an unprecedented two months. The Large Language Models (LLMs) that power GenAI are ground-breaking technologies that promise to alter the landscape of human lives as we know them today. However, this excitement is accompanied by some unease around the loss of jobs and human agency, and the looming threat of an AI superintelligence. There are also worries about bias, environmental damage, plagiarism, and a threat to democracy itself.

Most GenAI action is happening in two countries, the US and China. Other large countries are carving out their own space, as well, although at a smaller scale. The European Union is focusing on regulation to make GenAI ethical and responsible, and the United Kingdom aims to lead the world in global AI governance. The United Arab Emirates is, also well-entrenched in the LLM race. 

We believe that India has the opportunity to forge a third path, one that it has shown the world in recent years. Our proposition, however audacious, is that India should consider building JanAI as a DPG. We have no doubt that both the government and corporate India have the capability to build a local LLM – fine-tuned with Indian data for Indian languages, context and unique use cases. It would be more important, however, to consider the objective and aim for such an exercise.

With a tripartite partnership between a proactive government, our world-leading IT industry, and some leading technical institutions like the IITs, JanAI could be an invaluable proposition. Indian companies could then develop their own specific finetuned LLMs from Bharat LLM; startups could leverage it through open APIs along with ChatGPT and others to build innovative India-specific products; and millions of individual creators could use the generative powers of JanAI to build content- and creativity-led businesses. India could combine the two biggest movements in digital technology – Generative AI and Digital Public Goods – into a uniquely Indian third way to create JanAI out of GenAI, and, once more, serve as a GenAI for All model for the world.

(Bindra is the managing director and founder of Tech Whisperer Limited UK. Tiwari is the Global Head of Digital Engineering Center, Thoughtworks India)

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