artificial intelligence: MeitY, DoT at work on projects for fair AI development


Several projects are ongoing under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) on fair development of artificial intelligence, as the technology permeates different sectors and increasingly becomes an integral part of everyday life.

The Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC), a technical body under DoT, has proposed to develop voluntary standards for assessing and rating the robustness of AI systems in telecom networks and digital infrastructure. It has already initiated stakeholder consultations on the subject and invited inputs, the last date for which is December 15.

“There are two tracks of projects. One, under MeitY, which is funding eight projects, and the TEC (under DoT) is already working on standards for responsible AI,” a government official told ET. “Last year, we released a standard for assessment and rating of AI systems for fairness. If there are biases, how do you assess? This standard standardises the process and quantifies it.”

In July last year, based on stakeholder consultations and inputs from domain experts, the TEC also unveiled a standard for “Fairness Assessment and Rating of AI Systems”, outlining procedures for assessing and rating AI systems for fairness.

“Once we had the standard, we needed an ecosystem. We needed standard tools to test the AI systems. Also, we needed infrastructure like testing laboratories which can win academia,” the official said.


The departments have signed memorandums of understanding with Delhi’s Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Coimbatore-based Amrita University and the Defence Institute of Advanced Technology in Pune among others. Meanwhile, under expressions of interest (EoIs) called by MeitY, several academic institutes have tied up with the TEC, the official said.

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In early October, IndiaAI (a MeitY knowledge portal/research organisation) selected eight ‘Responsible AI’ projects against the EoIs floated under the Safe and Trusted AI Pillar of the IndiaAI Mission.“There are two things that we aim to achieve with the MeitY-supported projects. One, we should extend our standard to other modalities like pictures. There can be biases in AI-generated images. In unstructured text like tweets, emails, tables, natural language processing and LLMs (large language models), we’d also like to extend our standards to assess fairness,” the official said.

The operative word here is voluntary, said the official, for helping AI startups, and not to be prescriptive.

These projects are aimed at safe and trusted development, deployment and adoption of AI, by developing indigenous responsible tools and frameworks that are contextualised to India’s social, cultural, and linguistic diversity.

The themes of the eight MeitY-funded projects are: machine learning, synthetic data generation, AI bias mitigation strategy, explainable AI framework, privacy enhancing strategy, AI ethical certification framework, AI algorithm auditing tool and AI governance testing framework.

The selected project applicants include academic institutions, startups, research organisations and civil society members.



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