Data-rich Indian govt provides fertile ground for Amazon's tech experiments

Tech giant sees huge opportunities in the govt's initiates in the areas of healthcare, skilling, agriculture and smart cities

Technology giant Amazon is leaving no stone unturned to tap a plethora of opportunities thrown up by the increased adaptation by the Indian government and by public sector organisations, of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The government sector has, in fact, become a key focus area for Amazon Internet Services, which provides Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) technology in India, as it moves ahead of a slew on projects such as improving crop yields for farmers, digitisation of public healthcare services, implementing skilling missions and building smart cities.

“India is an emerging economy, growing at a very fast clip and there are a lot of opportunities to innovate, whether it is healthcare, skilling, agriculture and smart cities,” says Manav Sehgal, head of solutions architecture, Public Sector India, Amazon Internet Services.

Government-run Common Services Centres (CSC), for example, use AWS to simplify and speed the delivery of citizen services across India, including rural areas. The CSCs required a scalable, cost-effective solution, and needed to reduce response times and increase reliability. To achieve this, they turned to AWS for a solution that brings together AWS content delivery, storage, management, and high availability of services to improve the delivery of citizen services in rural India.

“Almost 90 per cent of the features and services that we build and launch are based on requirements that our customers are quite clear about. The remaining 10 per cent consists of requirements that we anticipate on behalf of our customers, as they are not able to specify what exactly they expect from technology,” added Sehgal.

According to Sehgal, government websites and departments are quite rich in information, but the content are mostly available in the form of structured and unstructured data. This makes it difficult to run analytics on it. For this, the company is offering Amazon Textract that automatically extracts text and data from scanned documents, going beyond simple optical character recognition technology to identifying the content stored in the forms and tables.

Another technology called ‘Amazon Comprehend’ is a natural language processing (NLP) platform that uses ML to find insights and relationships in the text. For example, one can also extract relevant medical information from unstructured text such as medical condition, medication, frequency from a variety of sources like doctors’ notes, clinical trial reports, and patient health records. ‘Amazon Transcribe’ makes it easy for developers to add speech-to-text capability to their applications. Amazon Translate, a neural machine translation service, helps in rapid and affordable language translation.

The company is also offering ‘Amazon Rekognition’ which makes it easy to add image and video analysis for different applications. One can identify objects, people, text, scenes, and activities in images and videos, and also detect any inappropriate content. It can also be used to detect, analyse, and compare faces for a wide variety of user verification, people counting, and public safety use cases.

“No machine learning, data science or coding expertise is required… government agencies can experiment with these latest technologies, without making huge investments,” says Sehgal. 

The Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has adopted AWS for the India Urban Observatory (IOU). This has helped it in data-driven governance and simplify solution integration from multiple partners for over 100 cities across the country. Now, MoHUA can collect and analyse data from many sources to build more accurate insights across cities and improve governance and public services.

Amazon is also finding agriculture as a fertile sector for the adoption of its technologies in India. Using AWS, Indian Farmers Fertilizer Cooperative Limited’s (Iffco) IT operations efficiency has improved by at least 80 per cent while generating cost savings of more than 50 per cent. Iffco uses AWS to empower farmers through e-commerce and helps them increase crop yields. The e-commerce portal was set up and run on AWS in less than a week. It provides farmers with educational videos on effective crop farming and usage of Iffco products. By learning effective crop-farming techniques, farmers have also been able to increase crop yields significantly.

Agritech companies such as CropIn use AWS technologies for remote sensing and deriving near real-time actionable insights on crops. CropIn has digitised over 5.5 million acres of farmland and enhanced the lives of nearly 2.1 million farmers while gathering data on 384 crops and 3,662 crop varieties in over 46 countries.

In Bengaluru, Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, a non-profit has published open dataset generated from ‘IChangeMyCity project, at the Registry of Open Data on AWS. The project provides insight into the complaints raised by citizens related to the issues in their neighbourhoods and the resolution of the same by the civic bodies. Said to be India's first open dataset, it’s image-heavy with over 200,000 images which is ideal for machine learning and computer vision applications. It also contains citizens’ feedback in vernacular language as well as English that can be used for sentiment analysis and natural language processing use cases.

According to Madhur Singhal, a leader in New Technologies at management consulting firm Praxis Global Alliance, the government sector in the country is rapidly adopting cloud services. “Indian IT service providers are architecting cloud solutions and are chasing this opportunity aggressively. But global cloud infrastructure majors who provide the infrastructure and platforms for cloud development and orchestration will naturally stand to gain from this fast-growing demand.”