Keynote insights: From financial inclusion to digital public intelligence
Shri M. Nagaraju, Secretary, Department of Financial Services, highlighted India’s progress: financial inclusion, powered by public systems, has expanded dramatically from roughly 21% in 2008 to over 80% today. He said DPI and AI are central to India’s push toward a $5 trillion economy and improved global competitiveness.
UIDAI CEO Bhuvnesh Kumar and NISG CEO underlined NISG’s role in marrying government speed with private-sector efficiency to accelerate DPI-led AI adoption. Mahaveer Singhvi (MEA) urged India to become a creator of AI, building foundational models, datasets and compute infrastructure that reflect national priorities rather than merely consuming global tools.
Report launch and the 100x opportunity
NISG and EY released a joint report at the inaugural session that found a strong consensus: converging AI with India’s DPI stack can multiply impact across health, education, agriculture, water and energy. Rahul Rishi of EY described the potential as a transformational “100x” opportunity where DPI’s force-multiplying effect is amplified by AI-driven anticipatory, personalised and scalable services.
Panelists from EkStep Foundation, Gates Foundation, TCS and ONDC debated trust, transparency and governance. EkStep’s Shankar Maruwada said DPI 1.0 solved many welfare delivery problems; DPI 2.0 with AI must deliver “digital public intelligence” that anticipates citizen needs while safeguarding privacy.
Sectoral use-cases: agriculture, health and language tech
Speakers presented practical successes. Dr. Pramod Kumar Meherda of the Ministry of Agriculture noted that agricultural DPI built around trusted farmer identities enables interoperable records, personalised advisories and better market access. Digital India BHASHINI’s CEO Amitabh Nag described language AI powering localised advisories and farmer-facing tools.
DBT Mission officials explained how AI already improves Aadhaar-based verification and reduces fraud, while targeted biometric and face-authentication tools have strengthened delivery models across schemes.
Policy steer: focused models and responsible AI
NISG and participants stressed that not all public problems need large general-purpose models; many high-impact scenarios require specialised, sector-specific models. Shri Srinath Chakravarthy of NISG highlighted that focused models are cheaper to build, easier to govern and more suitable for sensitive domains such as health and agriculture.
Speakers also underscored responsible AI principles: transparency, fairness, auditability and robust data governance. The conference recommended accelerating investments in compute, datasets and publicly available foundational models built to Indian contexts.
Takeaways and next steps
Delegates agreed on actionable priorities: scale sector-specific pilot projects, expand compute and dataset commons, strengthen public-private governance mechanisms, and mainstream responsible-AI toolkits into DPI deployments. NISG’s report will feed into MeitY planning to operationalise AI+DPI pilots across states and central departments.
The conference concluded with a call to democratise technology ensuring AI and DPI remain affordable, auditable and accessible so they can drive inclusive progress toward Viksit Bharat 2047.
