India ready share AI models with Global South: IT Secretary S Krishnan

The Indian government is open to sharing its AI models with the Global South after achieving reasonable capacity and scale, a senior government official said on Friday. While speaking at FICCI's conference Bhashantara 2025, Electronics and IT Secretary S Krishnan said that the development of technology for languages to help people communicate in a frictionless manner can lead to huge value addition to the economy. He said that the UN Under-Secretary-General, during a visit to India, had appreciated India's AI-related works. "We had a discussion and then he said your model appears interesting. At a stage when you have adequate capacity both in terms of compute and in terms of the kind of models that you have, will you be willing to share this with the Global South? This is something that we have declared that we are open to doing and something that we will do," Krishnan said.

The Global South term refers to developing and less-developed countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America regions. The government has launched the Bhashini project for the development of AI-based language translation technology.

Krishnan said most people in the country would prefer to communicate through voice as opposed to in writing. "I think voice-based communication has a critical role to play and that is where India can truly lead. The minute you say it is voice, then it means that you have to pick it up in the language that they are most comfortable with and what they would like to speak in. This is clearly the challenge that there are a number of researchers, a number of innovators and others who are addressing nationwide," he said. Krishnan said that through the India AI Mission, the government is making available more computing capacity and more data sets. "If you are able to sort of reduce the friction loss, if you are able to reduce the communication loss and the way that people communicate to each other, that in itself results in a huge wastage going away. I think that's where this entire effort is so important, particularly in a multilingual and multicultural society like India," he said. FICCI's Multilingual Internet and Universal Acceptance Committee Chairman, Ajay Data said that domain names are now available in all official Indian languages. "With more than 6 billion people globally not speaking English as their primary language and India home to 19,500 languages and dialects, data emphasised the vast commercial opportunities that lay ahead," he said. Data said that website names in local scripts will ease communication for the vernacular masses.

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