How India’s government leverages AI and technology
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Image courtesy of Dickie Currer
By Dickie Currer
On June 5, 2024, India concluded the world’s largest election. Did you know that over 900 million of its citizens registered to vote? This equates to approximately 65% of the country’s mammoth population of 1.429 billion people.
For a country which has over 121 recognised languages, a working age population of just 48% (compared with Australia’s 65%) and has over 12% of its citizens living on less than A$2.15 per day, this is a monumental effort and a huge shift from the 46% of voters that turned out for the country’s first ever election in 1951.
India’s growing economy and increased standards of living – which has seen a sizable proportion of its citizens moving above the poverty line – has played a huge role in this.
Though it’s arguable that the advancement and widespread adoption of technology has had the biggest impact in making the world’s largest democracy more democratic.
One obvious example of this is the advent of the mobile phone. In the early 1990s, there were only an estimated six landline phones for every 1000 Indians.
Today, smartphones have become the primary devices Indians use to access the internet and social media, with over 1.1 billion (roughly 82.54%) of the population having access to a cell phone, and Indian mobile data being one of the cheapest and most ubiquitous in the world.
Politicians have sought to capitalise on this, and in recent years have increasingly turned to social media and the messaging app WhatsApp in their campaigns, leading observers to characterise the 2019 parliamentary election as “the WhatsApp election.”
With campaign messages, key information on where and how to vote and even viral memes in support or against certain parties being shared at lightning speed reaching every corner of the country in a matter of seconds.
In 1951, this type of campaigning information would have stayed localised.
Political parties in India also spent an estimated US$50 million on authorised AI-generated content for targeted communication with their constituencies in the 2024 election.
Long before the election began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a tightly packed crowd, celebrating links between the state of Tamil Nadu in the south of India and the city of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
Modi proudly announced the launch of his “new AI technology” as his Hindi speech was translated to Tamil in real time, with crowds in the south wearing earphones, as one would in the United Nations.
In a country with hundreds of languages and thousands of regional dialects, communication is critical to winning an election campaign. Modi’s BJP party adopted AI tools to make his personality accessible to voters in regions where Hindi is not easily understood.
Since 2022, Modi and his BJP have been using the AI-powered tool Bhashini to translate Modi’s speeches with voiceovers in Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi. Telugu and Malayalam, among many others.
Though the use of sparsely regulated technologies like AI can have its downsides. With countless deepfake impersonations of candidates, celebrities and dead politicians (estimated as being viewed by millions of Indian voters) making their way into this election’s dialogue.
Image courtesy of Dickie Currer
India has also invested heavily in public goods, spanning a triad of digital identification, payments and data management.
This includes the government-run biometric digital identity system launched in 2010; the Unified Payments Interface – a digital payments system launched in 2016 through the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), a public-private venture; and DigiLocker – which enables secure online access to government documents.
S. Krishnan, the secretary of India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology was recently quoted as saying, “as a democracy and as a country that believes in democratic values, it is very important to take everybody along.
“That is the context of what we intend to do with digital public infrastructure, which is an important part of democratising access to public services.”
According to the IMF, this focus on digital inclusion has led to an unprecedented number of bank accounts being opened. From 35 per cent in 2011 to around 80 per cent in 2017.
The next general elections are in 2029, when India is projected to have a population of over 1.5 billion.
What democracy will look like in the country then is uncertain, though what is certain is that there will be new technological advancements and applications that don’t exist today that will impact how it plays out.
Hopefully ones that continue the country’s egalitarian progress.
