What Can Budget 2021 do for Big Data and Artificial Intelligence

With barely a few days left for the budget to be presented, a lot is being predicted and a lot of theories are doing rounds already. Well, nothing new! This has been happening every year. Needless to say, what garners utmost attention has to be 'which sector gets what'. Evident enough, a lot of contradicting opinions arise pertaining to different decisions made. All sectors are being talked about – education, agriculture, healthcare, tourism, defence and a lot more, in the budget. But, what needs to be understood is that an equal importance is to be laid on "Data infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence skills".

Just as the saying – "Better late than never", the coming Budget can serve as an opportunity to unleash employment and productivity multiplier. All this can be achieved by generous funding in the field of data science, funneled to research and commercial data centres.

The benefits of a data-based economy need no special mention. Having said that, India has a huge potential of becoming one such economy.

The major areas of concern as far as India's economy is concerned is – the health and education sector in India have still got a long way to go, the agricultural productivity has been struggling since forever now, targeting of welfare schemes is poor. But on a positive note – all this can be dealt with easily using "Big data" and "Artificial Intelligence".

For example, surveys in addition to 'Big data', can aid in improving precision that'd, in turn, reduce the fiscal costs of the welfare schemes, one can make use of the images obtained from drones and satellites to identify poor and backward areas of the society and also identify the crop damage as a result of pests and / or calamities. AI can help in assessing the impact of policy interventions as well.

On the health front, India now has made it a point to make incorporate Electronic Health Records (EHR's), something that other countries have been doing for over decades now. Nevertheless, today, with the usage of EHR's, the information contained can be used for timely detection of diseases and also improve the quality of treatment, with no second thoughts. It has become easier than ever to reduce the treatment costs by enabling the doctors to take real-time data-driven decisions – all thanks to the "Big Data".

No one can deny the fact as to how important education is and that it'll continue to be. On that note, it is possible to identify patterns in the learning challenges because of the Electronic education records. The 'Big Data' analytics of these records paves way for monitoring the performance of both – the teachers and the schools. The parameters that form the basis could be in terms of dropouts, educational attainments, the ability of the students being employed, etc.

Yes, India is insanely diverse but there are certain obstacles that cannot be neglected. One surely is the problems arising out of data infrastructure. A lot of scientific as well as strategic data is stored beyond the national boundaries which, needless to say, is a threat to our security. There's no place where one can find collective data be it from the education sector, the health sector, gaming or any sector for that matter. The data is crazily scattered and the necessity to bring it together would do nothing but open up a door of opportunities.

The question that lies ahead – what can the upcoming budget do? Well, the loopholes of the system as far as big data and AI is concerned can be worked upon for we know the benefits and opportunities ahead are immense. Initially, shelling out money may not seem convincing but in the long run, this step will yield results – much to everyone's surprise.