Tamil Nadu Government Teams Up With IIT Madras To Use AI, Blockchain, Drones In Public Service Delivery

Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA) has partnered with Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) of IIT Madras to support its data science and Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-related challenges of Tamil Nadu Government. The collaborating entities include education, healthcare and agriculture, as reported by Financial Express.

The move comes after Tamil Nadu government released its new e-governance policy aiming to offer all services online by 2023.

The collaboration will take up five channels of engagement. The first step is to support research related to data science for the government and e-governance. Secondly, through projects, the collaborators will develop products which will have decision support systems and provide insights for governance.

The capacity building for data science and communications technology will be focused on the government of Tamil Nadu. The collaboration will also conduct periodic data science and ICT related Hackathons and workshops for students. Finally, registered entities will be created to collaborate with external IT vendors to scale up the projects.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) TNeGA, Santhosh K Misra, said, “Today, governance needs to move from demand mode of service delivery to predictive mode of service delivery. Governments need to tap the power of AI, Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain and drones in addressing the needs of their citizens. Tamil Nadu government is the first state government to collaborate with a premier research institute such as IIT-M for harnessing the power of AI and Blockchain in areas of health, education and agriculture.”

IIT Madras established the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI) to undertake foundational research in many areas of AI and data science, such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, network analytics, interpretable machine learning, and domain aware AI.