Ahmedabad, Jan 31 (PTI) India lacks good regulatory framework pertaining to Artificial Intelligence, said BJP Rajya Sabha MP Sujeet Kumar on Saturday.
Addressing entrepreneurs at i-HUB AI Founders Meet here, he said he had been strongly urging the Union government to seriously think of a regulatory framework and some legislation.
“Under India’s AI mission, we have good cloud AI infrastructure, data centres being built and talent pool, but what is lacking is a good regulatory framework. India is still guided by IT Act of 2000. But 26 years is a long time in the tech world. Technology is evolving almost every week. And then we have intermediary IT Rules of 2021, and Digital Data Protection Act of 2023,” he said.
A lot of AI-induced offences and crimes are landing in courts, which are handicapped in resolving such matters in the absence of any regulatory framework and judicial precedence for guidance, he claimed.
Kumar gave an example of how AI can be misused with tools like Grok, and also highlighted the legal uncertainty around ownership of AI-generated output.
“Under India’s Copyright Act of 1952, copyright is granted only to human authors, but AI systems are not human. As a result, when content is generated using AI tools, there is no clear legal answer on who owns or authors that output. This ambiguity creates growing challenges for founders, especially as AI adoption increases,” he said.
Therefore, founders must be mindful of the legal and regulatory implications of the products they build, he said. Despite these challenges, Kumar emphasized it is still a promising time to be a founder in India.
AI is going to be of great help in resolving some of the challenges in healthcare, agriculture, disaster management, good governance, and reaching the last mile, Kumar asserted.
At this point, India shouldn’t be thinking of building a frontier model like ChatGPT but must be more focused on SLMs (small language models) and on building applications which are more contextual and specific to solving India’s challenges, the MP said.
“China built ‘DeepSeek’ which is not a foundational model for answering queries or for solving any challenge; it is a geopolitical tool. It is a narrative tool built by China to perpetuate its false narratives. Just type ‘is Arunachal Pradesh a part of India’ in DeepSeek and see what answer you get,” he pointed out.
“We can also probably build a model like that, an application like that, which will tell our side of the narrative. But I think at this point in our development journey, we should be rather more focused on SLMs and on building applications which are more contextual, which are more specific to solving our challenges,” he said.
Pointing out that AI has addressed language and inclusion challenges in Parliament, he said MPs previously had to give advance notice to speak in languages other than Hindi or English due to the lack of translators.
“To solve this, a Lok Sabha committee launched an initiative to enable real-time translation and transcription across India’s official languages. Today, Parliament supports real-time translation in 11 of the 22 official languages with nearly 99 per cent accuracy,” he said.
The entire system was built at Rs 50 lakh using Indian developers and government platforms like Bhashini (developed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) and Anuvaadini (developed by the Ministry of Education), while Google quoted a price for the same project which was “probably half of the Indian Parliament’s budget”, he claimed.
The Rajya Sabha MP also highlighted the use of AI for social impact, particularly in scouting tribal sporting talent in regions like Kalahandi in Odisha.
“AI is used to identify and benchmark local athletic talent against global standards and to provide targeted support such as nutrition, coaching, and training, helping talented individuals overcome lack of exposure and infrastructure,” he said. PTI KVM PD BNM
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