In News:

• In a major stride towards achieving Viksit Bharat (Developed India) by 2047, NITI Aayog has launched two landmark initiatives under its Frontier Tech Hub — the ‘AI for Viksit Bharat Roadmap: Opportunity for Accelerated Economic Growth’ and the ‘Frontier Tech Repository’.
• These initiatives aim to harness the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other frontier technologies to catalyse inclusive growth and innovation across sectors.

AI for Viksit Bharat Roadmap

The AI for Viksit Bharat Roadmap, launched by Finance Minister Smt. Nirmala Sitharaman and Minister for Electronics & IT Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw, outlines a practical and strategic framework to accelerate India’s AI-led growth. It focuses on two primary levers:

1. Accelerating AI adoption across industries to boost productivity, efficiency, and innovation.
2. Transforming Research and Development (R&D) through Generative AI, enabling India to leapfrog into global innovation leadership.

The roadmap emphasizes AI’s potential to drive robust, inclusive, and technology-driven economic growth, while underscoring the need for a collaborative ecosystem involving government, industry, academia, and startups.

Frontier Tech Repository

• Complementing the roadmap, the Frontier Tech Repository is a digital knowledge platform that showcases over 200 real-world impact stories across four critical sectors — Agriculture, Healthcare, Education, and National Security.
• It demonstrates how states, startups, and innovators are using technology to transform governance and improve livelihoods at the grassroots level.
• The repository serves as both a learning resource and a replication model, helping policymakers and administrators identify scalable frontier technology solutions.

Frontier 50 Initiative

• To ensure widespread adoption, NITI Aayog launched the Frontier 50 Initiative, which will support 50 Aspirational Districts and Blocks in selecting and deploying frontier technologies showcased in the repository.
• The goal is to accelerate service saturation across key Aspirational District Programme (ADP) and Aspirational Block Programme (ABP) themes — such as education, healthcare, and livelihood generation — through tech-enabled governance.

NITI Frontier Tech Impact Awards

• To further motivate innovation, NITI Aayog announced the Frontier Tech Impact Awards, which will recognize three states excelling in the use of technology for improving governance, education, health, and livelihoods. These states will receive support to scale their initiatives and create measurable, transformative outcomes.

About the NITI Frontier Tech Hub

• The Frontier Tech Hub serves as NITI Aayog’s platform to anticipate mega technological shifts and strategize India’s preparedness to harness emerging technologies for inclusive growth, supply chain resilience, and national security.
• It brings together experts from government, industry, and academia to assess opportunities and risks associated with frontier technologies such as AI, quantum computing, and biotechnology, thereby shaping policies for technology-driven development.