India's big AI dreams just got a reality check--from the government itself

Low intensity of research: A lack of data hinders potential research work at homegrown companies or in the academic world. Not only is the volume of data scarce, its quality is also often deemed questionable. Inadequate expertise, manpower, and skilling opportunities: Unlike the US and China which have hundreds of educational programmes in data science and AI, India has next-to-nothing. Though the country churns out over a million engineers every year, a dismal 4% of AI professionals in the country have worked on cutting-edge technologies like deep learning and neural networks. High resource cost and low awareness: Professionals skilled in areas such as AI and data analytics come at a far higher cost than other techies in India.