NITI Aayog launched two transformative initiatives, the ‘AI for Viksit Bharat Roadmap’ and ‘Frontier Tech Repository’ under its Frontier Tech Hub.
- The AI for Viksit Bharat Roadmap delivers a clear, sector-specific action plan, while the Frontier Tech Repository inspires states and districts to scale technology for real-world impact.
- NITI Aayog also announced two initiatives to amplify grassroots adoption of technology and scale impact creation: Frontier 50 Initiative & NITI Frontier Tech Impact Awards for States
About NITI Aayog’s AI for Viksit Bharat Roadmap
- Focus: Achieving sustained 8%+ GDP growth by unlocking productivity and innovation through AI integration
Frontier Tech Repository:
- Frontier 50 Initiative wherein NITI Aayog will support 50 Aspirational Districts / Blocks (ADP/ADB) to pick use cases from the Repository and deploy those frontier technologies that have potential to accelerate saturation of services across ADP/ABP themes.
- NITI Frontier Tech Impact Awards for States recognizing three states excelling in use of tech to improve governance, education, healthcare, livelihood etc., and supporting them to scale measurable, transformative outcomes.
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- Objective: Bridge the GDP growth gap, capture 10–15% of global AI value, and establish India as a trusted global AI leader
- Approach: Two primary levers:
- Accelerating AI adoption across industries to enhance productivity and efficiency.
- Transforming R&D with generative AI, enabling leapfrog innovation.
Key Highlights of the Report
- Key Economic Opportunity: According to a NITI Aayog report, accelerated adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across industries can contribute USD 500-600 billion to India’s GDP by 2035 on the back of increased productivity and efficiency in the workforce,
- The adoption of AI across sectors is expected to add USD 17–26 trillion to the global economy.
- Generative AI-driven R&D can create $280–475B in incremental GDP impact by 2035
- Under the government’s Viksit Bharat vision, India’s GDP could rise to USD 8.3 trillion, an increase of USD 1.7 trillion over the current growth path.
- Key Data Advantage: India can become the data capital of the world by scaling AI Kosh and building certified, interoperable, anonymized datasets in genomics, manufacturing telemetry, finance, and mobility
- Key Skilling Ecosystem: Establishing AI Chairs in top universities, national certification programs, and an AI Open University can create a future-ready workforce.
- Continuous reskilling and portable “learning accounts” can protect jobs and ensure lifelong employability
- Sector Specific Benefits: Banking, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and automotive emerge as priority sectors for AI-led transformation
AI Opportunities for India: Three Major Unlocks
- Accelerating AI Adoption Across Industries: This lever is projected to bridge 30-35% of the required growth step-up
- Financial services: AI for compliance, fraud detection, and hyper-personalized banking.
- Manufacturing: Smart-factory corridors, predictive maintenance, and AI-ready industrial parks
- Transforming R&D with Generative AI: This unlock is expected to contribute at least 20-30% of the required uplift
- Drug discovery costs can be cut by 20–30%, timelines reduced by 60–80%.
- Software-Assisted Vehicles (SAVs) and AI-designed components can make India a global hub for advanced automotive innovation
- Strengthening Technology Services (addressed in a separate NITI publication): This could contribute another 15-20% to the step-up.
- Boosting India’s role as a technology service provider with AI-enabled higher-value solutions.
Opportunity for India
- Demographic Dividend: With the world’s largest STEM workforce and a young population, India can channel AI adoption into productive employment and innovation.
- Data Advantage: India’s vast, diverse, and multilingual datasets can make it the global data capital, powering innovation in genomics, manufacturing telemetry, and financial inclusion.
- AI for Inclusive Growth: AI-driven solutions in agriculture, healthcare, education, and governance can bridge regional disparities and deliver last-mile services effectively.
- Boost to Manufacturing: AI-enabled smart factories and predictive maintenance can integrate Indian industries into global Industry 5.0 supply chains, enhancing competitiveness.
- It said the analysis shows that financial services and manufacturing can be most impacted and might have up to 20-25 per cent of their sectoral GDP attributed to AI by 2035.
- Automotive Transformation: With AI-designed components and Software-Assisted Vehicles, India can become a major global automotive and auto-component exporter.
- Technology Services Upgrade: AI strengthens India’s reputation as an IT leader by moving beyond back-office services to high-value, AI-powered global solutions.
Strategic Enablers for AI-Led Growth
- Critical AI Infrastructure: Building sovereign cloud platforms, high-end GPU clusters, and interoperable national datasets to ensure India’s independent capability in AI scaling.
- AI Governance: Establishing ethical frameworks, explainability standards, risk management protocols, and regulatory sandboxes for safe and responsible AI deployment.
- Private Sector Leadership: Driving AI adoption in core industry processes, creating bionic organizations, and investing in workforce reskilling for sector-wide competitiveness.
- Role of Academia: Anchoring fundamental research, creating AI safety and testing sandboxes, and designing advanced curricula to nurture PhDs and AI-specialist talent.
- Equitable Access: Ensuring MSMEs, Tier-2/Tier-3 cities, and underrepresented regions have access to shared AI tools, datasets, and compute resources to prevent a digital divide.
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Challenges
- Data & Infrastructure Gaps: Fragmented ecosystems, limited high-performance computing, and reliance on legacy IT systems.
- Talent Shortages: Insufficient AI-specialized workforce in sectors like manufacturing and biopharma.
- Regulatory & Governance Risks: Privacy concerns, lack of explainability frameworks, and global patent recognition challenges for AI-generated outputs.
- Inequitable Access: MSMEs and smaller institutions risk being left behind due to high costs and lack of awareness.
Way Forward
- Strengthening IndiaAI Mission: Focus on its seven pillars which are compute capacity, innovation centers, datasets, applications, skills, startup financing, and safe AI deployment.
About India AI Mission
- IndiaAI: It is a national program by the Government of India to develop indigenous Artificial Intelligence capabilities, infrastructure, datasets, and startups under a structured public-private partnership model.
- Launched by: Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)
- Launched in: Approved by Cabinet in March 2024
- Objectives:
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- Make AI in India and Make AI work for India
- Democratize AI access and use for governance, startups, and citizens
- Build indigenous foundation and language models
- Promote ethical, safe, and responsible AI
- Create a self-reliant AI innovation ecosystem
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- Fostering Public-Private Collaboration: Build joint ecosystems where industry, academia, and government co-create AI solutions, regulatory sandboxes, and global standards.
- Driving Sector-Specific Initiatives: Establish AI-ready industrial parks, create national datasets (omics, manufacturing telemetry), and design specialized workforce training programs.
- Ensuring Global Alignment: Harmonize India’s AI frameworks with the EU AI Act, UNECE automotive standards, and global pharmaceutical norms to secure competitiveness in exports.
- Promoting Inclusive Adoption: Extend AI access to MSMEs, Tier-2/Tier-3 cities, and gig workers through targeted skilling, financial subsidies, and robust digital infrastructure.
EU AI Act (2024)
- World’s first comprehensive AI law, adopted by the European Union.
- Approach: Risk-based framework and stricter rules for “high-risk” AI (healthcare, law enforcement, critical infrastructure).
- Key Provisions:
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- Bans: Social scoring, manipulative AI, scraping facial data, exploitative biometric categorisation.
- Restrictions: Biometric surveillance only in rare, court-approved cases (e.g., terrorism prevention, missing persons).
- High-Risk AI: Mandatory risk assessments, logging, human oversight, transparency.
- Generative AI: Training data summaries, copyright compliance, deepfake labelling.
- Penalties: Up to €35 million or 7% of global revenue for violations.
- Timeline: Prohibited uses banned within 6 months; full regime in place by mid-2026.
- Global Impact: Seen as a template for the US, China, India, Japan, Brazil, UAE and others drafting AI laws.
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) & AI
- Develops international norms and standards across transport, trade, environment, and digitalisation.
- On AI governance, UNECE provides: Policy forums for member states to share regulatory approaches.
- Harmonisation of digital & AI standards to ensure cross-border consistency.
- Support for developing countries in adopting safe AI aligned with sustainability and rights.
- Significance: While the EU AI Act sets binding rules for Europe, UNECE helps shape broader UN-level dialogues on AI ethics, safety, and sustainability.
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Conclusion
The AI for Viksit Bharat Roadmap treats AI as a national growth imperative, aiming to bridge the growth gap and build resilient industries. Success will rest on balancing innovation with inclusivity and speed with sustainability. The launch marks a call for collective action by uniting government, industry, and innovators to shape a technologically empowered Viksit Bharat by 2047.
17 Sep 2025
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