The National Informatics Centre (NIC), the Indian government’s technology arm, is witnessing a sharp rise in requests from ministries, departments, and state agencies to build new AI-driven software and integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into existing public-facing digital platforms. Senior officials at the NIC told The Economic Times that demand has accelerated across sectors as government entities seek to improve service delivery and reduce reliance on foreign AI tools.
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Judiciary Emerges as a Major AI Adopter
Among the most active adopters is the judiciary, which has begun using NIC-developed tools to streamline case handling. A search and analytics platform now allows judges to quickly scan Supreme Court judgments dating back to 1950, while a document-summarisation tool helps them process petitions that run into hundreds of pages.
“From a search analytics tool made for judges to instantly flip through all Supreme Court rulings from 1950 onwards, to AI tools that scour district databases to effectively find eligible beneficiaries of direct benefit transfer schemes, the ministry of electronics and information technology’s tech partner has created a suite of tailored AI based tools for central and state entities,” the officials said, according to the report.
“The judiciary is becoming a major user of AI. Judges have 60 cases to dispose of in a day. Instead of going through an average of 300-400 pages of court documents and wait for clerical staff to give them the data, they can upload a petition to our tool and get a template-based summary providing the brief of the petition, the antecedents of the cases, and other insights,” an NIC official was quoted as saying in the report.
The Supreme Court has also deployed AI Panini, a translation system covering all 22 official Indian languages, to translate legal texts from English to Hindi. The tool was trained using datasets released under the National Language Translation Mission.
AI Saransh
NIC has seen a surge in demand for other text-based tools as well, including AI Saransh for English-language summarisation and AI Shruti for real-time transcription. “We are seeing a lot of requests for AI Saransh, a text summarisation service in English and AI Shruti, a streaming text transcription service, from government departments,” another official reportedly said.
AI-as-a-Service with Indigenous Tools
Officials said these systems form part of an “AI-as-a-service” model now being offered to government users as the Centre encourages officials to avoid foreign AI applications due to geopolitical and data-security concerns.
“NIC had established a centre of excellence in artificial intelligence nearly seven years back in January 2019. But a cross-section of the central and state government workforce is only now beginning to understand the geopolitical risks emanating from using foreign AI tools. As a result, our AI resource division is now providing all our tools as part of an ‘AI as a service package’ to keen government users,” another official was quoted as saying.
States Turn to NIC for AI Deployment
Several states—particularly Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Karnataka—have commissioned NIC to design and deploy AI solutions for governance. After the multilingual Kumbh Sah’AI’yak chatbot received positive feedback during the Mahakumbh earlier this year, NIC’s Uttar Pradesh unit began using AI to update beneficiary lists through district-level data and to streamline access to land records via Board of Revenue portals.
“The government had received positive feedback after rolling out the Kumbh Sah’AI’yak chatbot, conversant in 11 languages that provided real-time assistance to millions of pilgrims at the Mahakumbh in January this year. Since then, NIC’s state centre in Uttar Pradesh has used AI to sift through the state’s district databases for updating the list of government beneficiaries and made it easier for citizens to access land records through the Board of Revenue portals,” the official reportedly said.
AI for Rural Development
In rural development, the Ministry of Panchayati Raj has urged states to adopt Gram Manchitra, a GIS platform that incorporates NIC’s AI-driven geospatial image analytics, according to a ministry official quoted in the report. The system can analyse drone imagery to identify development indicators such as concrete rooftops, assess the feasibility of solar installations, and support flood monitoring and disaster prevention at the local level.
Face verification services built on NIC’s AI Satyapikaanan framework are also gaining traction, according to another official cited in the report. He added that regional transport offices are using the tool to automate driver’s licence renewals, while the Inter-operable Criminal Justice System (ICJS) has incorporated it for suspect identification across courts, police, prisons, and forensic laboratories.
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