India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has instructed developers working under the IndiaAI Mission to make bias mitigation a key priority before deploying artificial intelligence models. Officials emphasised that given India’s diverse society, foundational AI models supported by the government should avoid producing insensitive or discriminatory outputs when handling complex prompts. “Sensitive connotations linked with caste, gender, food practices, regional and linguistic stereotypes, as well as ethnic and religious differences have to be handled with utmost care. We want Indian models to be inclusive, and not discriminatory or based on historical biases. All under-construction LLMs have been told to integrate stringent stress testing into their framework,” a MeitY official said.
Earlier in October, IndiaAI invited expressions of interest for Stress Testing Tools (STT), aimed at evaluating AI systems under extreme or adverse conditions. This includes testing models against adversarial inputs, data drift, and distributional shifts, going beyond conventional IT load testing. Officials noted that the focus is now on AI behaviours such as fairness, privacy, and accountability, ensuring models perform reliably in diverse real-world scenarios. Bias mitigation, they explained, systematically identifies and reduces unfair prejudices that may arise from historical data patterns, similar to Amazon’s scrapped 2018 AI recruitment tool, which discriminated against female candidates in the US.
Several Indian startups and industry-academia consortia are competing to develop the first indigenous foundational large language models. This includes Param-1, a bilingual model with 25 per cent Indic data, and other speech or vision models for Indian languages by BharatGen and Tech Mahindra’s Indus LLM. Startups like Sarvam AI, with its 24-billion-parameter hybrid model Sarvam M, and Soket AI’s emotion-aware automatic speech recognition model DHRITH, developed under MeitY-backed Project Eka, are also actively contributing to the initiative.
Bias mitigation is also central to India’s plans for a global AI initiative called ‘AI Commons’. The platform will provide open-access tools for responsible and ethical AI deployment worldwide, featuring ethical AI certification, anonymization, and stress testing capabilities. Officials said AI Commons will encourage global collaboration, forming part of a proposed international AI partnership that India aims to announce at next year’s summit.
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