GG News Bureau
New Delhi, 8th Dec: The India International Science Festival (IISF) 2025, underway since December 6, continued to energise scientific and technological discourse on Sunday as leading voices from academia, industry and research lauded Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of an AI-driven Viksit Bharat@2047. A high-impact panel discussion titled “AI & AGI: The Future of Intelligence” brought experts together to decode the country’s next leap — from Artificial Intelligence to Artificial General Intelligence.
The session featured Prof. Rajeev Ahuja, Director of IIT Ropar; Gopal Krishna Bhatt of Intel; Vivek Kumar Rai of NVIDIA; and Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder of Sarvam AI.
IndiaAI Mission Anchored in PM’s Future Vision
Prof. Rajeev Ahuja told students that India is preparing to emerge as a global AI powerhouse by 2035, driven by the IndiaAI Mission launched by the Prime Minister. The mission aims to train one crore youth, build national compute capacity, develop indigenous AI models, and promote ethical AI.
He highlighted IIT Ropar’s role as one of India’s three Sectoral AI Centres of Excellence, with a specialised focus on agriculture, and said India’s strengths in talent, data and scientific temperament place it on track to become a semiconductor hub — a cornerstone of technological self-reliance.
Industry Leaders Highlight Deep-Tech Momentum
Intel’s Gopal Krishna Bhatt detailed India’s advances in server design, chip development and HPC hardware, citing the Rudra server collaboration with CDAC as a model of indigenous innovation. He said dozens of India-based server and data centre designs are now in progress due to the government’s semiconductor and digital infrastructure push.
NVIDIA Showcases AI’s Transformative Impact
NVIDIA’s Vivek Kumar Rai demonstrated how AI is reshaping scientific research, from climate modelling and drug discovery to materials science and mobility. He said GPU-based systems are accelerating national missions and breaking linguistic barriers — supporting the PM’s vision of technology as a democratising force.
Indian-Language AI at the Core of Digital Inclusion
Sarvam AI’s Pratyush Kumar presented India’s first sovereign Indian-language LLM project under the IndiaAI Mission and emphasised the need for India-centric datasets and models. AI, he said, is now central to governance, agriculture, climate solutions and economic decision-making.
Panel: AI to AGI — The Next Leap
A panel featuring Xavier Kurian (Neysa), Ganesh Gopalan (Gnani.ai) and Dr. Manish Modani (NVIDIA) stressed that AI adoption in India is now mission-critical across BFSI, manufacturing, healthcare and citizen services.
Ganesh Gopalan noted that under PM Modi’s leadership, AI has become a national differentiator, enabling rapid scale-up of multilingual voice automation and foundational AI models.
Dr. Modani said India’s expanding HPC and GPU infrastructure is accelerating breakthroughs across scientific fields, positioning India as a leader in the global shift from AI to AGI.
Across the event, speakers reiterated that India’s demographic strength, combined with strong government backing, is setting the stage for global AI leadership. Students were urged to explore deep-tech, embrace AI tools and contribute to India’s long-term vision of becoming a knowledge-led, innovation-driven Viksit Bharat by 2047.
