Ethics key to optimal use of AI in health sector: Jitendra Singh

Ethics will be a key determinant of how effectively artificial intelligence (AI) is used in the health sector, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Jitendra Singh said on Tuesday.

Citing the example of the Government’s sovereign multilingual AI engine Bharat Gen, he said the present Government is ready to come forward even at the formative stages of a new phenomenon.

“Ethics will be a very important determinant of how optimally AI can be used in the health sector,” the minister said. He was speaking at a session in the AI Impact Summit.

Singh said BharatGen is a government-owned sovereign model, but there are other private sector players also who are working on these models, such as digital health and digital case histories. “In the times to come, we would also have to integrate. Neither can they work in isolation, nor can we. So, we have to be prepared for that,” he said.

Launched in October 2024, BharatGen is a government project to develop a sovereign AI model which will provide services like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models for Indian languages.

At the session, BharatGen unveiled its new 17B (billion) parameter LLM (large language models).

Currently, BharatGen’s AI models support several Indian languages, including Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil and Telugu.

BharatGen has released domain-specific fine-tuned models for Ayurveda (Ayur Param), Indian agriculture (Agri Param) and Indian legal domain (Legal Param).

In addition, all BharatGen models (text, speech and vision) are useful for applications across healthcare, agriculture, education and governance.

The 17-billion-parameter multilingual AI model, called Param2, will support 22 Indian languages. The model is developed under the BharatGen consortium, which operates out of the Technology Innovation Hub at IIT Bombay and is supported by the Department of Science and Technology.

Rishi Bal, CEO of BharatGen, said Param2 is a ‘mixture of experts’ model built to work across 22 Indian languages.