Govt panel report on AI Governance Guidelines: 'Regulation should aim to minimise the risk of harm'

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) has released a report on development of AI Governance guidelines. The subcommittee's report has proposed a comprehensive AI governance framework, recommending a whole-of-government approach to managing AI development and deployment. This includes the establishment of an empowered mechanism, an Inter-Ministerial AI Coordination Committee, to streamline AI policy and regulations. MeitY has released the report for public consultation, with a window for comments open till January 27.

The report emphasizes that the AI Coordination Committee should be a permanent body that coordinates efforts across various national authorities and institutions involved in AI governance. This approach is designed to create a unified roadmap and address the complexities of AI systems at scale.

The Committee’s role includes ensuring adequate visibility and risk assessments for AI systems, especially those developed or deployed by private entities not currently interfacing with regulators. The aim is to identify potential risks while avoiding regulatory overreach that could stifle innovation.

Regular meetings of the Committee will focus on harmonizing existing efforts, issuing joint guidance, strengthening laws, and promoting self-regulation. These actions are intended to create a policy environment that fosters responsible AI usage across multiple sectors, including healthcare, finance, and transportation.

The report stresses the importance of creating context-specific datasets to assess fairness and bias in AI models. The Committee is encouraged to stimulate the creation of Indian-specific datasets and sectoral data to ensure AI models are developed and evaluated responsibly.

The AI Coordination Committee is envisioned to include both official members (e.g., government officials, regulators) and non-official members (e.g., industry experts, academics). This mixed composition ensures that diverse perspectives from AI developers, data providers, and end-users are integrated into policy and regulatory discussions.

Other key recommendations:

- To develop a systems-level understanding of India’s AI ecosystem, MeitY should establish, and administratively house, a Technical Secretariat to serve as a technical advisory body and coordination focal point for the Committee/Group.

- To build evidence on actual risks and to inform harm mitigation, the Technical Secretariat should establish, house, and operate an AI incident database as a repository of problems experienced in the real world that should guide responses to mitigate or avoid repeated bad outcomes.

- To enhance transparency and governance across the AI ecosystem, the Technical Secretariat should engage the industry to drive voluntary commitments on transparency across the overall AI ecosystem and on baseline commitments for high capability/widely deployed systems.

- The Technical Secretariat should examine the suitability of technological measures to address AI related risks.

- Form a sub-group to work with MEITY to suggest specific measures that may be considered under the proposed legislation like Digital India Act (DIA) to strengthen and harmonise the legal framework, regulatory and technical capacity and the adjudicatory set-up for the digital industries to ensure effective grievance redressal and ease of doing business.

The committee's report concluded that regulation should aim to minimise the risk of harm. "Even enabling innovation is a minimisation of harm as people may not be able to innovate due to lack of clarity or gap in law. Therefore, harm mitigation should be the core regulatory principle while operationalising the seven principles discussed in this report."

It added, "The question - to regulate the “technology” or an “application,” can only be answered in the context of the above core principle and the answer will continue to evolve based what is needed to be done to minimise the risk of harm. Regulation controls the behaviour of people by calling out what is permissible and/ or not permissible and penalising deviation from the desired behaviour. Regulation imposes costs on everyone. Therefore, the risk of harm has to be real and specific for a discussion on regulation and for regulation to be useful."