Now Reading: India can commoditise AI as next digital public infrastructure
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India can commoditise AI as next digital public infrastructure
India can make artificial intelligence the next free public utility, following the model of Aadhaar, UPI and cheap data, The Hindu argues. The country’s distinct digital public infrastructure (DPI), identity, payments and…
The Story in Brief
India can make artificial intelligence the next free public utility, following the model of Aadhaar, UPI and cheap data, The Hindu argues. The country’s distinct digital public infrastructure (DPI), identity, payments and data portability, now handles 20 billion UPI transactions a month and enrolled 1.4 billion people through Aadhaar. Between 2016 and 2019, the cost of a gigabyte fell from about $4 to under 30 cents, bringing 500 million Indians online. The newspaper calls this a ‘civilisational’ shift and says the next step is to commoditise AI as a publicly accessible rail, replicating the same interoperable, low-cost playbook.
The Indian Opinion
The Hindu‘s vision of AI as the next free digital rail is inspiring but skips hard realities. India commoditised identity, payments and data partly because one telco (Jio) absorbed network costs and forced the market. AI requires chips, power and cooling, not just open-source models. The narrative that India will ‘commoditise AI’ by repeating the DPI playbook ignores that foundational compute is far less shared than spectrum was. The real test is whether the government can push AI model training costs to near-zero without subsidising hardware at taxpayer risk. If not, this remains a tech-libertarian fantasy, not infrastructure.
Source: thehindu.com
This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
