AI in eGovernance :
Artificial Intelligence is the discipline that seeks patterns in data about all the aspects that allow an entity to determine how to perform a task and/or help make a decision. As is the case of human, AI models also get matured by observing data samples and/or by interacting with an environment gathering contextual information relevant for the problem at hand, possibly competing against or cooperating with other entities.
This definition is based on the need to emphasize the following aspects that are crucial when considering AI application in any domain: (1) Being able to learn from examples (i.e. not coded to solve a task by a programmer), (2) Possibly operating in an environment populated by other entities, (3) Accomplishing a task that would require intelligence if done by a human.
NIC has Created Artificial Intelligence Resource Division, which has been working towards increasing use of Artificial Intelligence Technologies in eGovernance space, helping Mission Mode Projects, Central & State Govt. Departments & Organizations with providing various AI services facilitated through Meghraj Cloud of NIC such as :
Image & Video Analytics Assistance by NIC (IVAANI): is a bouquet of AI services based on Computer Vision with following Service listings & with 33.97+ Crore hits in FY 2024-25
AI Satyapikaanan – AI Face Verification & Person Identification Services (10 projects). It is available through API Services over NAPIX gateway. It can be considered as a Digital Public Infrastructure as it is being used for a wide range of applications by different ministries/departments/ states etc.. RTO uses it for Face Verification for Online Learners’ License Exam, Automatic Driving License renewal, Photo Image Analytics for Online Form submission by NTA for JEE,NEET, CTET etc.., UPSC, For Geo Fenced Mobile based attendance of skill Development trainees at private training centres by Govt. of West Bengal, for Life Certificate for Pensioners by Meghalaya, for evisitors management by Rajbhawan Uttarakhand, for Suspect Identification through face recognition in ICJS portal etc..
Components of Face-Analytics services facilitated are :
- Face Detection
- Face Verification
- Face Anti-Spoofing,
- Gesture Recognition,
- Person Re-Identification
- Image Quality Assessment.
These Services are useful for
- Identity Management in Attendance Monitoring of Employees, Trainees / Trainers, Students / Teachers
- De-duplication of data
- Tracing of Missing Children, and Tracing of Criminals etc.
- Identity management in Life Certificate Mobile Apps where Aadhar is not mandatory
- In Online Proctoring tools for verifying the examinee with images in their Identity Cards.
AI Satyapikaanan is a Copyrighted Product Service of NIC.
AI Vihangam Drishti -GeoSpatial Image Analytics Services. This can facilitate area Estimation & Planning like it was used for drone image segmentation for 30000 Villages to identify Concrete Roof Top and estimate area for solar Paneling. It can also be used for monitoring & preventing natural disasters.
AI Parkhi – AI Document Image Analytics Services (2 Projects)
AI Shirshank – Head Count Services in Hybrid mode (1 project in PoC)
Text Analytics Assistance by NIC (TAANI): with following Service listings & AI pipelines with combinations of them facilitated for various projects with 1.35+ crore hits in FY 2024-25
AI Matra – (10 projects) Text Transliteration is provided as a Service’ in 22 Official Indic Languages. This is a service for transliteration of text from any of the mentioned scheduled Indic languages to English and vice versa. It also helps user edit the content in that language using English keyboard. It is being extensively used Health for printing of Sickle cell Anaemia cards.
NIC has also developed two AI models for multilingual Script Recognition in mixed mode texts that include both Native and Romanised scripts, in collaboration with IIT Roorkee and published paper in IEEE.
AI Panini – Text Translation Services in 22 Official Indic Languages (15 projects). Model used are open sourced from National Language Translation Mission. An Instance of AI Panini has been created with legal corpus from English to Hindi and is being extensively used by Supreme Court of India.
AI Saransh – Text Summarisation Services in English (12 Projects) – This service is used for Extractive Text Summarisation in English. It summarizes the content of the text document by extracting exact lines from the content that the model considers as important to making the summary. For Multilingual Text Recognition & Summarisation a combination of above services will be used in pipeline to produce the desired summary in English which can then be translated to any language of choice.
AI Shruti – Streaming Text Transcription Services in 9 Indic Languages Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Malyalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telegu and Kannada (6 projects)
AI Nibhrit – AI based solution to mask Personal Identifiable Information (PII) like Fingerprints, Aadhaar Numbers and PAN on PDF documents has been developed that takes pdf document as input and returns:
a. Co-ordinate of the regions in pages to be masked
b. It can also return masked pdf document, if necessary.
The PAN and Aadhaar numbers are masked from the text available in the PDF and from the PAN and Aadhaar card images in the PDF as well. The service is available over NICNET.
AI Nibhrit also facilitates extraction of Highlighted points in a pdf including handwritten notes. It then facilitates Coordinates of the regions in the pages so highlighted/ scribbled for further use.
AI Nibhrit is a Copyrighted Product Service of NIC and is implemented in Directorate of Stamps and Revenue in 12 states and by RERA in Himachal.
Virtual Assistance by NIC(VANI): is a conversational AI framework with following Components & with 1.35+ Crore hits in FY 2024-25
- VANI has a Communication Layer for handshaking between business modules & backend inhouse AI engine & frontend BYOB/Business Logic layer for User Profile & Bot Management & API References/ BYOB Orchestration layer Watcher & monitor with Queue manager/ Scheduler/ Logger/ Chat Transfer to Agent
- VANI facilitates Multilingual chatbots through integration with AI Panini for 22 Indic languages text translation & with AI Shruti to facilitate voice in 9 Indic languages
- Multilingual Chatbot Services – is a paid Service under NICSI facilitated for many projects.
VANI framework is copyrighted by NIC.
Generative AI Services (AI Anveshika) : (2 projects). GenAI Services have been facilitated on prem using open source Large Language Models (LLM) & Retriever Augmented Generator (RAG) pipelines. Anveshika is facilitating Query responses using deep learning for getting real time information using Natural Language Processing for creating embedding of documents and RAG pipeline and Generative AI to generate appropriate reply to the queries.
It has been facilitated for Supreme Court Rulings since 1950, as well as for Single Document Query Search & Summarisation facility for petitions etc.
Agentic AI Services (SakshamAI): Agentic AI Services working in combination with other AI pipelines for information gathering from both text, tables etc.. handling both structured data and unstructured documents. (1 project under PoC).
